


linings made of silver

by jemmasimmmons



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Best Friends to Lovers, F/M, Love Rosie AU, Teenage Pregnancy, background Huntingbird - Freeform, brief tripdaisy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-02
Updated: 2016-05-15
Packaged: 2018-06-05 21:49:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 32,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6724885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jemmasimmmons/pseuds/jemmasimmmons
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It feels like a long time before Fitz lets her slide back down to the ground again, but even when he does he doesn’t step away from her so that they are still pressed almost chest to chest. Jemma is acutely aware of how close he is to her, so close that she can see every freckle on his cheek and every fleck of blue in his eyes. She has a phenomenal urge to reach up and kiss him, to cup his face with her hands and pull him against her to feel his lips caress hers.</p>
<p>It would be so easy to do too; a simple upward motion and a leap of faith, and her entire world would be changed forever."</p>
<p>Leopold Fitz and Jemma Simmons have been best friends since childhood. They're inseparable...or at least, they were. Life has a funny habit of getting in the way of love. A Love, Rosie AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. the beginning

**Author's Note:**

> As a lover of both Cecelia Ahern's book "Where Rainbows End" and the film adaption "Love, Rosie", I was really excited to write a Fitzsimmons AU of it. I know it's a fairly popular AU idea for these two and I can only hope I've done it justice! The title comes from Ingrid Michaelson's 'Are We There Yet' which is a song that I love.
> 
> Come talk to me on tumblr @jeemmasimmons.

**11:59pm, 14 th** **September 2003**

The music is blaring and the lights are flashing, and in order to combat the throbbing headache he is developing at the base of his skull, Fitz picks up another tequila shot and necks it back.

Which probably isn’t the best idea he’s ever had.

The club around him spins, its red and blue lights fusing painfully to create violet shapes on the back of his eyelids, and for one terrible moment, Fitz thinks he is going to end up falling flat on his face on the floor.

But then Jemma is in front of him, her eyes bright with promises and her cheeks glowing with her last vodka shot. She grabs his hand excitedly, the single stabilising force in the universe keeping him steady on his feet.

She twines his fingers in his, her forehead bumping hard against his own as she giggles, reaching out a hand for the next shot lined up on the bar. Fitz is just about to raise his voice, tell her that maybe she’s had enough, that maybe they’ve both had enough, but the amount of alcohol in his system has made him sluggish and Jemma is pulling a face and putting the glass back down again before he’s even managed to open his mouth.

‘Dance,’ she demands, using her other hand to take his wrist and pull him backwards onto the dancefloor with her.

Fitz allows himself to be pulled, and once they are in the middle of the dancers he twirls her, around and around, until she is giddy with laughter and her face is alight and he knows with the surest of certainty that he would follow her anywhere she wanted to go: half way across the globe to chase down their dreams, into this really rather dodgy club on Doncaster high street, or into this kiss, as she falls into his arms and their lips brush together in the lightest of touches.

Fitz’s breathing hitches and his hands move slowly to Jemma’s waist where he holds her as they sway unsteadily on their feet, their faces so close together that he can feel her breath, hot and heavy on his neck. Jemma’s eyelids flutter and, very carefully, she tilts her face upwards towards him and Fitz watches her mouth quiver.

The instant her lips touch his again, prising them softly open with her tongue, the whole club around him falls away, crumbling to pieces in a wake of a supernova. As her hands work backwards into his hair and his move to press her closer to him, Fitz decides that the whole world could come to an end around them and he probably wouldn’t notice, not as long as he could continue kissing his best friend the way he has wanted to for his whole life.

_This_ , he thinks,  _this is the beginning_.

 

 

 

**10:04am, 15 th** **September 2003**

 

_This is the end_ , Jemma thinks miserably.

The thin strip of light shining through her bedroom curtains is far too bright for her eyes to handle and the sound of footsteps on the stairs is so loud that she buries her head further down into her duvet in hope of muffling it. When the door to her bedroom creaks open, the sound seems to spit all the way through Jemma’s skull and she moans, peeking her head out of her blanket cocoon to glare at whoever it is who dared to disturb her on this of all mornings.

 Standing in the doorway is Leopold Fitz, her next door neighbour, best friend of fourteen years and quite possibly the only person in the world she could stand to see right now. He gives her a rueful grin.

‘Lance let me in,’ he says, in response to her unasked question. He is taking care to keep his voice low, Jemma notes. ‘He was even smugger than he usually is.’

‘Oh, really?’ Jemma squirms to one side so Fitz can flop down on the bed next to her, wincing with the effort. ‘Why’s that?’

Fitz kicks off his shoes and pads across her carpet towards the bed. He seems to hesitate before moving to lie down next to her, which Jemma thinks is a little strange. After nearly a decade of friendship, it makes no sense for him to be shy around her  _now_.

‘Well, if I had to go out at three o’clock in the morning to pick up my sister and her best friend from outside a club when they were both too drunk to find a taxi rank on their own, I reckon I would be feeling pretty smug too.’

‘God.’ Jemma moans, covering her face with her hands as her cheeks flame. ‘ _Three_  am?’

‘Yeah.’ Fitz lays his head down next to her feet. His own are propped up on the pillow next to her hair and she pulls a face before pushing them away from her. ‘It was…quite a night.’

His voice is filled with a kind of nervous hopefulness and Jemma doesn’t quite understand why it’s there. She shakes her head, then deeply regrets the action as her head spins and she groans again.

‘I think you’ll find it was more of a  _nightmare_.’

Jemma’s hands slip down her face, which is burning with humiliation. Now that she’s trying, she finds that she can’t remember anything past about eleven o’clock the night before. Her mind is drawing a total blank, and she is filled with horror at how extensive the gap in her memory is.

_Anything_  could have happened in that time.

Fitz falls silent for a minute. Then his hand comes up to rub comfortingly at her knee, which is poking out of the duvet at an angle and Jemma hears him lick his lips before he speaks.

‘So, um, what…what do you think we should do about it?’

‘Nothing,’ Jemma groans. ‘God, I’m so embarrassed…’

‘…but you don’t have to be…’

‘Fitz.’ She interrupts him with as firm a look as she can manage in her current state, before her voice turns pleading. ‘I honestly want to forget the entire night even happened. Can we do that? Just pretend we never even left the house, that we stayed in all night watching films instead? Please?’

There is a beat before Fitz sits up and answers her.

‘Okay. If that’s what you want, then, uh…it never happened.’

Jemma’s shoulders sink into her sheets with relief, and she lets out a little sigh.

‘Thank you,’ she murmurs, and lifts her hand out of her duvet to pat Fitz fondly on the leg. Then, she peers up to look at him properly and frowns. ‘Fitz, are you feeling okay?’

He looks dazed, his face even paler than his usual pasty complexion, and he is staring intently at his hands in his lap.

‘What?’ He looks up at her and blinks rapidly, rubbing at his eyes with his fingers. ‘Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine.’

‘Because if you’re going to be sick, I’d really rather you did it in the bathroom and not in my bed.’

Fitz’s face cracks into a smile and as he slumps back down onto her mattress with a groan, Jemma feels a pang of deep rooted affection for him, the only person she has ever wanted to share her dreams, and her disastrous nights out, with. He is, purely and simply, her best friend.

Then, she sighs and tucks her head under the duvet to go back to sleep.

 

 

 

**5:25pm, 15 th** **June 2004**

‘I’ve been asked to prom.’

Jemma hears Fitz choke on his Fanta and turns to look at him, sitting cross-legged beside her on the park green, as he splutters. They are in the park this evening as a brief interlude to their relentless A-Level studies, and the early summer sun is welcoming on Jemma’s back and face as her forehead creases up in concern for her choking best friend. She thumps him helpfully on the back until he waves her off.

‘Who…who asked you?’

She points, to a group of boys from their school that are having a kick-about on the opposite side of the park, evidently having had the same idea as them to escape their books for the evening. Fitz squints towards them, and swallows hard.

‘And, um…what did you say?’

Jemma rolls her eyes. ‘I said  _no_. Honestly, Fitz, we promised to take each other to prom when we were  _five_. Did you really think I’d forget that just because some boy with a particularly impressive muscle to fat ratio asked me to go with him instead?’

‘Oh.’ Fitz’s shoulders sink with obvious relief and Jemma hides her smile in her can of Sprite. In the dappled evening sunlight his hair seems to glow golden, and it reminds her of the day they’d made their agreement, back in the very earliest days of their friendship.

_I want you to take me to the prom_ , she’d said, very matter-of-factly and without looking up from her laborious finger painting.  _Okay_ , he’d replied, and she had leant over to daub a dollop of blue paint on his nose in thanks.

For some reason, the memory makes Jemma’s heart ache.

After a few moments, Fitz clears his throat and shifts his position on the grass so that he is leaning back with his palms on the ground. His gaze is still directed towards the boys playing football when he ventures cautiously: ‘an impressive muscle to fat ratio, you say?’

‘Mmm.’ Jemma sips her drink and nods, narrowing her eyes to scrutinize. ‘Very.’

‘Oh.’

‘I think he might end up being The One, actually.’

‘Really?’ She could have sworn Fitz’s voice rose a few octaves, despite his obvious attempt to maintain nonchalance. ‘And what qualifies him for that particular honour, exactly?’

Jemma tilts her head to one side and considers. ‘Well, other than the outstanding muscle to fat ratio, he has a wonderfully symmetrical face, and an athletic body shape which he keeps fairly toned from physical activity. According to my research, those are some of the qualities which will make him best suited for…the job in hand.’

Next to her, Fitz shakes his head. ‘I still can’t believe you researched it.’

‘I want to be prepared!’ Jemma protests. ‘You can only have sex for the first time once, you know. It’s widely considered an important rite of passage for a teenager to progress into adulthood. I want to make sure I do it properly.’

‘And  _he_ ’s the right person to do it with?’

For some reason, Fitz sounds disapproving and all it does is make Jemma feel indignant. She straightens her back and tilts her chin up defiantly.

‘Yes. He is.’

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Fitz’s jaw tighten.

‘Fine.’

They sit in heavy silence for a moment, before Fitz clears his throat.

‘Actually, somebody asked me to prom too. Or at least, somebody asked  _me_  to ask  _them_  to prom.’

Jemma’s head whirls around to him, her heart missing a beat. ‘Did they? Who?’

‘Um…’ Fitz nods towards a gaggle of teenage girls, most of whom Jemma recognises, leaning against a park bench a little way away from them. ‘The one with the pink backpack.’

‘She’s pretty,’ Jemma notes, and finds that her hands have closed into fists.  _‘Very_  pretty.’

‘Yeah.’ Fitz stares after them. ‘I suppose she is.’

Jemma looks at him and finds that the wistfulness in his face makes her heart twist with a previously unknown feeling, and she swallows back a bitterness on her tongue. She turns her head away from him again and makes a decision.

‘Go ask her then.’

This time, it is Fitz’s turn to spin his head towards her in surprise. ‘What?’

‘Go ask her.’ Jemma takes a careful sip from her can and smiles at him. ‘You obviously want to.’

‘Yeah,’ Fitz admits reluctantly, and then changes his mind and shakes his head. ‘But…I’m going with you.’

‘And  _I’ve_  been asked by someone else too. I wouldn’t be going on my own, neither of us would.’ He hesitates, and Jemma rolls her eyes. ‘Fitz, it’s  _fine_. Ask her. Go now, before they leave.’

She gives an encouraging nod in the girls’ direction, and keeps a smile on her face as he gets up, brushing the grass off his shorts. He shoots her a last look over his shoulder, one that might have been apologetic, before walking towards the bench with his hands shoved deep in his pockets.

Jemma watches, long enough to see the girl with the pink backpack’s face light up as Fitz talks to her, and to watch as she flings her arms around his shoulder to nuzzle into him. The expression on Fitz’s face is hidden by her hair and so Jemma turns her head away again, lifting her can to her mouth again to drain it dry.

Maybe the fizzing of the bubbles in the drink will do something to ease the numbness settling into the pit of her stomach.

 

 

 

**10:59pm, 22 nd** **June 2004**

 

[To: Fitz, 22:59]  _Where are you?_

 

[To: Fitz, 22:59]  _Fitz?_

 

[To: Fitz, 23:00]  _Leopold Fitz, ANSWER YOUR BLOODY PHONE!!!_

 

[To: Jemma, 23:01]  _Jemma, I’m still downstairs, at the prom. Where are YOU? I thought I saw you and your date sneak off upstairs after dessert._

 

[To: Fitz, 23:02]  _We did. And we are still upstairs_.

 

[To: Fitz, 23:02]  _Fitz, I need your help. I need it really, really badly. Where exactly are you?_

 

[To: Jemma, 23:03]  _I told you, I’m downstairs. What’s happened?_

 

[To: Fitz, 23:03]  _Go to the stairs, I’m coming down to you._

 

[To: Fitz, 23:04]  _I’ve encountered a complication that I did not cover sufficiently while I was researching tonight._

 

[To: Jemma, 23:05]  _????_

 

[To: Jemma, 23:05]  _I’m at the stairs now. Could you be a bit more specific?_

 

[To: Jemma, 23:07]  _JEMMA????_

 

[To: Fitz, 23:10]  _Duringtheintercourseourchosenmethodofcontraceptionbecamemisplacedbutoncloserexaminationihavedicoveredthatitisnotmisplacedexactlybutratherverymuchinplaceinsideofme._

 

[To: Fitz, 23:12]  _Fitz? Are you there?_

 

Clutching her phone tightly in her palm, Jemma hurries to the staircase with her heart racing inside her chest.

She cannot even begin to comprehend how grateful she is that their school chose to hire out the entire hotel for the prom. It means there are less people around to see her flaming cheeks and humiliating state of undress.

She comes to the top of the stairs and is just about to pitch forward when she freezes, one hand on the bannister. At the bottom of the stairs, Fitz is waiting for her, staring at his phone screen in front of him. As she watches, his face colours and when he turns towards her his mouth is hanging half open.

When he sees her, he closes it sharply again and Jemma sees his Adam’s apple bob in his throat as he takes a deep breath and pockets his phone.

‘I realise that I asked for it, but that was… _way_  more information than I needed.’

 

 

 

**12:47am, 23 nd** **June 2004**

 

Jemma keeps the grimacing smile on her lips as the nurse bobs his head towards her and starts to shuffle out of the cubicle. He passes Fitz who is hovering by the curtain on his way out, and Jemma catches his eye to invite him in.

‘They didn’t even have a female nurse,’ she bemoans as soon as the nurse is far enough away not to hear her and slides her legs around so they dangle off the edge of the bed.

At midnight on a Tuesday, the A&E department at Doncaster Royal Infirmary is mercifully quiet, and when she and Fitz had arrived just an hour beforehand they had only had to wait for half an hour before Jemma was being ushered into an examination room, her nurse pulling the green curtain sharply across after them. She’d left Fitz behind in the waiting room, but she isn’t surprised to see him here now. Somehow, even when separated they always manage to find one another.

Fitz moves to stand in front of her and Jemma notices how his bowtie is sticking out of the pocket of his jacket and that he has undone the top button of his dress-shirt. Somehow, it makes him look even better than he had when she’d left him with his date at the entrance to the hotel four hours ago. Quickly, she shakes the thought from her mind.

‘In all fairness, I think he found the situation just as embarrassing as you did,’ Fitz observes. ‘If not more so.’

Jemma snorts, remembering the horror on the nurse’s face as she’d calmly explained the predicament her prom date had managed to get her into.

‘Yes, I expect having to remove a condom from a teenage girl’s vagina because her partner didn’t know how to attach it properly was about as new an experience for him as it was for me.’

Fitz inclines his head for a moment before remarking: ‘I think the research you did was slightly lacking in the practical application of things, it has to be said.’

‘Ohhhh,’ Jemma moans, letting her head slide forward so it is resting on his chest. The humiliation of the frantic past two hours is finally catching up with her, and she isn’t sure whether she ever wants to lift her face up again. ‘It was awful, Fitz, truly. And to think! All that time I spent researching, completely wasted.’

Fitz pats her back, awkwardly. ‘Maybe not. After all, it’s made you more prepared for next time, right?’

Jemma sniffs, and turns her head to one side to stare blankly at the wall. ‘It wasn’t even that enjoyable, really,’ she complains. ‘And because I was so stupid, I had to drag you away from prom to clean up a ruddy mess that wasn’t your own. I’m so sorry, Fitz.’

‘S’okay.’ He shrugs, making Jemma’s head bounce on his chest. ‘I wasn’t really enjoying myself in any case.’

Jemma lifts her head up and frowns at him. ‘You weren’t?’

‘Nah.’ Fitz gives her a weak grin and crosses his arms over his chest. ‘In fact, it could almost be said I was glad to use you as an excuse to get away.’

Jemma winces sympathetically. ‘Was your date really  _that_  bad?’

‘Not that bad…but she wasn’t you.’

Jemma blinks, and Fitz’s mouth hovers half open before he continues hastily.

‘What I mean is, we would have had much more fun if we’d gone just the two of us, as friends. As nice as the idea was to go with separate partners, I think we should have stuck to the original plan.’

‘We should have,’ Jemma agrees, rubbing her abdomen absently. The nurse had been careful if not gentle with the procedure, but it had been a pretty rough evening for her body overall, and she couldn’t wait to get home and go to bed.

Fitz watches her, chewing his lip anxiously. ‘Does it hurt?’

She shakes her head. ‘Not really, it’s a bit sore, that’s all. We can go home as soon as they bring me the paperwork to sign.’

Fitz nods, and pulls himself up to sit next to her on the bed. Jemma finds her head drooping, falling down to rest on his shoulder as they wait for the nurse to return.

In her head, she tries to find the words to tell him how grateful she is for what he’s done tonight: leaving both his date and his prom to drive her down to A&E and then wait with her. He had gone above and beyond the call of a usual friendship, but then again, how could she ever consider their friendship “usual”?

From the very first days, they had been inseparable, both at school and at home. Living next door to one another had allowed for playdates that never seemed to end, sleepovers almost every single night during the holidays and campouts in their gardens to watch the stars and whisper stories to each other until the sun came up. Everything that happened to Fitz felt like it was happening to Jemma too – when he hurt, she hurt; when he rejoiced, it felt like her own chest was going to burst with happiness.

_No_ , Jemma thinks,  _we’ve never had a usual friendship_.

_It’s always been more than that_.

Fitz breaks the silence first, nudging her gently off his shoulder so he can look at her. ‘I bought a new suitcase today,’ he says softly. ‘For when we move to Boston. It’s weird; after all this time we’ve spent planning it and talking about it, buying it was the first thing that made everything all feel real, somehow.’

Jemma squeezes his hand, a sudden delight coursing through her veins at the change in conversation.

‘Of course it’s real,’ she whispers. ‘Fitz, the dream’s finally coming true.’

The ‘dream’ had begun in her bedroom when they were six years old and pouring over a giant atlas book. Their fingers had traced routes from destinations on one side of the world to the other, and they had declared promises that, one day, they’d visit them all. From there the dream had only grown, until Jemma had a neatly plotted out plan in a favourite purple notebook, organised in decisive bullet points. First, they would study abroad, preferably in the US and definitely together; and then they would travel. They would get out of Doncaster, out of the UK, and explore all the places they’d been learning about since they were children.

It was a dream that was turning slowly and surely into a reality. Fitz had been offered a scholarship to Harvard to read English Literature back in the spring, while Jemma had only recently been accepted on a prestigious hotel management course at Boston University. Their flights were booked, their campuses were only a short bus ride away from each other and the whole world was at their fingertips.

After a lifetime of dreaming about moving away, Jemma couldn’t quite allow herself to believe it was actually happening. But it was. And she was making sure that she and Fitz would be by each other’s sides every step of the way, the way she was sure they were meant to be.

By the time the nurse returns with the paperwork for her to sign, Jemma feels invariably cheered and signs her name where it is required quickly. Once she is free to go, Fitz wordlessly slides off his jacket to hand it to her and Jemma takes it, pulling it around her wispy pink prom dress with a shiver.

‘Thank you.’

‘It’s okay. You looked cold.’

‘That’s not what I meant, Fitz.’ She catches his gaze and holds it, giving him a faint smile. ‘Thank you, for everything you’ve done for me tonight.’

He rolls his eyes at her and smiles. ‘What else was I going to do?’

Jemma smiles back and shakes her head. ‘I don’t know what I’d have done without you. I don’t know what I’d  _do_  without you.’

‘Or me without you,’ Fitz says automatically. He pushes the curtains to the cubicle back and turns back to her. ‘Just as well we never have to find out, eh?’

‘Just as well,’ Jemma repeats. She leans up to press a kiss to his cheek, and when she pulls back, Fitz’s face is as pink as her dress. ‘Thank you. For being my hero tonight.’

He shrugs, but there is a grin spreading across his face. ‘Always.’  

He gestures out in front of them, and Jemma steps forward, leading him out into the middle of the waiting room. When she is half way across, she slows down and holds her hand out behind her. Fitz takes it without questioning, and swings their hands lightly between them.

As they walk out the front doors, leaving the hospital behind them to hunt through the car park for where Fitz had parked his battered Audi Sedan, Jemma can’t help but feel that the best part of her life is just about to begin.

 

 

 

**12:45pm, 31 st** **August 2004**

With every step she takes, Jemma feels her feet get heavier and heavier as she trudges after Fitz down the endless airport corridors.

Outside, summer rain is streaming down the floor-to-ceiling windows in what feels to Jemma like the epitome of pathetic fallacy. She is tempted to mention it to Fitz, before glancing across at his face and deciding that even her best placed attempt at a light-hearted joke might tip both of them off into tears today.

They leave his brand new suitcase at the baggage drop and then trail across the airport to check-in. The lady behind the desk points them in the direction of security and Jemma doesn’t even have the heart to smile at her in thanks as they walk off together, side by side.

Her mind is far too filled with the dread that soon she will have to let Fitz go on without her to make room to think about anything else.

 

(‘No headaches, diarrhoea, blurred vision, fever, stomach cramps…?’

Jemma had shaken her head impatiently as Daisy, the pharmaceutical assistant, ran off a list of symptoms she didn’t have. Standing at the counter of the local pharmacy, she had been beginning to feel a little uneasy.

‘No, none of those. Look, I’ve just feel feeling rather sick so if there’s anything you could give me for that, I’d be very grateful…’

‘No, no! I have to do this properly. Give me a sec.’

Daisy had run a pencil down the checklist in front of her, her tongue sticking out of the side of her mouth in concentration. All of a sudden, the pencil had frozen, and she’d lifted her head up to glance uncertainly at Jemma.

‘Have you…have you missed a period?’)

 

Up ahead of them, the security gates are looming and Fitz slows down to a standstill and turns to face her. Jemma purses her lips together in an attempt at a smile, knowing that this is as far as she can go.

‘Are you sure you’ve got everything?’ she asks, knowing perfectly well that she is fretting unnecessarily and at the same time feeling completely unable to stop.

Fitz snorts. ‘Seeing as you and my mum all but packed my bags yourselves and the two of you are the most organised people I know, yes, I’m sure I’ve got everything.’

‘Passport? Boarding pass?’

He holds up a clear plastic wallet, one she had bought for him to hold all his important documents inside, for her to see. ‘They’re all here, I checked.’

Jemma exhales, twisting her hands in front of her. ‘What about your scholarship letter? You’ll need to show them that at the other end.’

Fitz opens the wallet and slides out a sheath of thick, creamy paper with the Harvard logo at the top.

‘It’s here,’ he confirms.

Jemma nods, her own acceptance letter to Boston University burning a painful hole in her back pocket.

 

(‘No…I mean,  _yes_ …but it’s not possible. I planned it all out; I took all the necessary precautions. I had the morning after pill!’

Daisy had grimaced sympathetically and lifted down a packet of emergency contraceptive pills from the cabinet above her head to show Jemma.

‘They’ve got a 90% effectiveness. 10%’s the catch.’

Jemma had sucked in a deep breath, holding the packet between her thumb and forefinger, as if by touching it as little as possible she could pretend this wasn’t happening.

‘ _Fuck_.’)

 

She watches as Fitz fumbles with the straps of his rucksack, and feels a twinge of emotion at how young he looks, standing in front of her with his hair still rumbled from sleep and his shirt not quite tucked in at the back. Blinking back the sudden tears that have appeared in her eyes, Jemma steps forward to help him straighten his straps, and dusts down the sleeves of his jacket too before she can help herself.

‘But if I have forgotten anything,’ Fitz is saying, ‘you can always bring it out when you come, right? Because you are still coming, aren’t you?’

The anxiousness in his voice is palpable, and Jemma has to hold herself back from wincing.

‘Of course I am,’ she replies, not quite allowing herself to meet his eyes. ‘I told you. There’s just…a family emergency that I need to take care of first.’

Which isn’t quite a lie.

 

(‘You don’t have to keep it, if you don’t want it.’

Jemma had spun around to face Daisy, her words startling her out of her stupor of self-pity.

‘What?’

In the week following that fateful day the pregnancy test had come up positive, Jemma had spent a lot of time in Daisy’s pharmacy, drawing support from the only other person in the world to know her secret.

‘The baby.’ Daisy had shrugged. ‘Lots of couples can’t have kids. If you’re not ready to be a mum, I’m willing to bet there are at least a dozen women in this town who  _are_.’

Jemma had swayed on her feet, the realisation of the truth of what Daisy was saying knocking her off balance.

‘I could still go to Boston,’ she had whispered. ‘All I’d have to do is wait six months, then reapply in the spring! I wouldn’t even have to tell Fitz, I could just make up an excuse, he need never know…’

A wide grin had spread across Jemma’s face.

‘I could still do it all.’)

 

‘You know, I don’t have to go today,’ Fitz offers, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. ‘If you wanted, I could stay…’

‘No!’ Jemma shakes her head quickly, giving him a fleeting smile of reassurance. ‘No, really, Fitz, it’s fine. Don’t worry about me. My ticket’s been postponed and I’ll fly out to join you in a few days.’

Fitz frowns. ‘If you’re sure.’

‘I’m sure.’

Taking a deep breath, Jemma steps forward and wraps her arms around his neck. A few years ago they had been almost exactly the same height, but now without her noticing Fitz seems to have grown several inches taller and she has to lean up on her tiptoes to get her arms to reach all the way around. Fitz’s arms come up to return the hug, holding her around her back and burying his head in her hair. When she feels his thumb start to stroke the back of her t-shirt, a comforting habit he’d picked up when they were children, Jemma feels tears start to prickle behind her eyes and she presses her face down into his shoulder to hide them from him.

The hug ends only when Jemma can’t hold herself up on her toes anymore, and she has to sink back down onto the balls of her feet. Even then, she is unwilling to let go completely and her hands linger on Fitz’s chest while his rest loosely on her waist.

As their foreheads brush against one another, Jemma feels Fitz suck in a breath.

 

(‘You don’t even want to  _tell_  him?’ Daisy’s eyebrows had shot up into her hairline. ‘Don’t you think he has the right to know he’s having a kid?’

‘What?’ Jemma had frowned for a moment before understanding. ‘Oh, no! Fitz isn’t the father! The father…’ She had shaken her head vaguely. ‘He doesn’t matter.’

Daisy’s face had visibly softened. ‘But Fitz does?’

Jemma had nodded, and slumped back against the counter.

‘Desperately so.’)

 

‘You should go,’ she whispers, keeping her eyes shut as a last defence against her tears. ‘I don’t want…I don’t want you to miss your flight.’

‘Jemma, you personally made sure that we would be here for precisely the advised two hours before take-off,’ Fitz points out quietly. ‘I’m pretty sure it would be impossible for me to miss my flight.’

‘Even so…’ Jemma opens her eyes, and finds that Fitz, with his forehead gently held against hers, still has his closed. His eyelashes seem to fall halfway down his cheek and she can see that he’s holding back tears of his own. ‘I worry.’

‘I know you do.’ Fitz opens his eyes into hers and gives her a wan smile. ‘“ _I have the highest respect for your nerves_ ,”’ he quotes, ‘“ _they are my old friends_.”’

Jemma snuffles, sinking her head forward into his chest. ‘ _Pride and Prejudice_. It’s still my favourite, you know.’

‘Yeah, I know. Although I think it’s Colin Firth who’s your favourite, really.’

‘True. Although, can you blame me?’

She feels him tilt his head to one side, considering. ‘No, not really.’

In spite of the situation, Jemma finds herself grinning, and allows herself to step away. Her fingers trail all the way down his arms, wanting to touch every part of him while she still can, until, finally, she lets him go.

 

(‘I can’t tell him. If I did, he’d feel like he had to stay.’

‘Even though he’s not the father?’

Daisy’s voice had been incredulous, and Jemma had shaken her head, sliding her back down the counter until she was sitting on the floor facing her friend.

‘You don’t know him like I do. He’d want to stay for me, and I couldn’t let him do that. Not when he’s worked so hard for his scholarship, not when it means so much to him! I…I couldn’t be that selfish.’

Jemma’s voice had cracked then and she’d sniffed hard, keeping her eyes trailed firmly on the floor in front of her. She’d heard footsteps, and then Daisy was sitting down next to her and reaching out to twine her fingers with her own. She’d given her hand a reassuring squeeze, and Jemma had felt a single tear trickle down her cheek.)

 

‘I should go, then,’ Fitz says, gesturing behind him to the security gate.

Jemma nods, brushing a loose strand of hair back behind her ear. ‘Yes, you should. And I’ll see you in a couple of days.’

She tries hard to make it sound like a promise, and not a wish.

 

(‘Just for the record,’ Daisy had declared. ‘I think this is a terrible idea.’

‘Just for the record,’ Jemma had admitted. ‘I think you’re probably right.’)

 

Fitz steps away from her, taking several steps backwards before he finally turns his back, one hand clutching his plastic wallet, the other hanging onto his rucksack strap. Jemma stands where she is as he walks up to the security gate and hands his boarding pass over to the airport staff waiting there.

When it is given back to him, with an inviting arm gesture to continue through security, Fitz glances back at her over his shoulder one last time. Catching his eye, Jemma tilts her chin up and nods, quirking her lips up into the smile she has given him so many times over the years she has begun to think exists exclusively for him. Fitz smiles back, and Jemma thinks that his shoulders relax, just a little.

She watches him go, as he turns away from her again and starts to weave his way through the security and the other passengers who have somehow appeared around them without them noticing. She watches until he turns the corner to go through into the waiting lounge and is finally gone from her sight.

Only then does Jemma allow herself to turn to leave, her feet and heart dragging behind her and her fingers fluttering with only the mildest feeling of resentment over her stomach, and the only reason she is staying here instead of leaving with him.

 

 

**4:14pm, 17 th** **January 2005**

‘Hello! It’s just me!’

‘Hello, “just me”,’ Jemma calls teasingly through to the hall when she hears the front door slam. She lifts her spoon up from the jar of Nutella beside her and licks the back of it. ‘I’m in the living room!’

She looks up as Lance stumbles through the doorway, weighed down by two large Tesco’s bags. He flashes her a crooked grin before fumbling around in his pocket for something. He pulls out a small orange tube and tosses it across the room to her; Jemma cups her hands to catch it and turns it over in her palm to read that they are essential prenatal vitamins for mother and baby.

‘I saw Daisy this afternoon,’ Lance grunts, manoeuvring himself through the living room and into the kitchen. Their parents’ house is set out semi open-plan, so that the doors between the living room and the kitchen could be folded back to open the two rooms up into each other. Jemma is sitting on the couch with her back to the kitchen, so as Lance passes her he can ruffle her hair. ‘She gave me those, said I had to give them to you and you’re to take one every day,  _no questions asked_.’

Since the summer, Daisy Johnson has become a permanent fixture in Jemma’s life and one that she is immeasurably grateful for. Daisy is no longer a pharmaceutical assistant, having decided that particular career pathway isn’t quite for her, and had since then attempted professional photography and amateur dramatics, neither of which had been particularly successful. She is currently employed part time at M&S, but still insists on taking charge of Jemma’s prenatal health, something Jemma is rather reluctant to do for herself.

Daisy wasn’t a replacement for Fitz. Jemma understood this; in any case, she didn’t  _want_  to replace Fitz. But Daisy was a good friend who cared about her and could make her laugh, and Jemma loved her all the more with every day that passed.

‘Thank you,’ Jemma mumbles, tucking the vitamins into her pocket. ‘I’ll text her, to say that I’ve got them.’

But instead of picking up her phone, she picks up her pen from the sofa and continues the letter she had been writing before Lance had come in, the paper propped up on her ever expanding stomach for support.

‘Are you writing to Fitz  _again_?’ Lance asks. Behind her, Jemma hears him clattering cans as he unpacks the shopping, sliding cans into cupboards and milk into the fridge. ‘Didn’t you send him a letter yesterday?’

‘Yes. But now I’m writing another one.’

Jemma shifts on the sofa, trying to angle her back into a new position and sighs. Over the last few weeks, she’s been finding it more and more difficult to get comfortable and the understanding that it is only going to get worse from here on out is making her more restless than ever.

The noises from the kitchen stop and she hears Lance come up behind her, leaning on the back of the sofa over her shoulder.

‘Can I read it?’

‘You won’t want to,’ Jemma warns, but he sweeps the letter off her belly anyway, and perches on the arm of the sofa to read it. She watches as Lance’s face creases up in disgust as he reads her letter and she can’t help but grin when he hands it back to her, pulling a face.

‘Bloody hell,’ Lance groans, sloping back into the kitchen and opening the fridge. ‘I know that you’re pregnant, Jem, and as your brother, I am willing to be as involved in this as you want me to be…but I have to draw the line at being told that level of detail about your bodily functions.’

‘I did say you wouldn’t want to read it!’ Jemma laughs, picking up her pen again to sign her name at the bottom of the letter. She’s used four sheets of paper, both double-sided, and there is still more that she wants to tell him, more that she wants to say.

In the kitchen, she hears Lance pull open the fridge door and the clatter of a knife on a chopping board.

‘Will  _Fitz_  want to read it? You know as well as I do how bloody squeamish he is.’

Jemma falls quiet, and picks up the pages of her letter, tapping the pages on the curve of her belly to bring them together. She folds the writing paper in half, then in half again, until the pages fit into the palm of her hand.

‘Jemma?’ The noises in the kitchen stop and Lance sighs deeply. ‘You’ve never sent him any of the letters you’ve written him, have you?’

‘I have!’ she protests. ‘I send one almost every fortnight, and I’ve sent a letter in return every time he’s written to me.’

‘But you’ve written to him practically every day,’ Lance points out, in a voice uncharacteristically quiet.

Jemma thinks of the cardboard box hidden underneath her bed, filled with all the letters she has written to Fitz over the past five months but will never send to him, letters where she has poured out her frustrations and her fears in the safety of knowing he will never read them, and she nods.

‘Yes. I suppose I have. Some…some just haven’t been sent to him.’

Lance walks out of the kitchen and into the living room to face her again.

‘You’ve still not told him,’ he guesses, and Jemma shakes her head.

‘No, and I don’t plan on it. It wouldn’t be fair.’

And it  _wouldn’t_. Not when the letters he sends home to her are so excited, so full of life. He writes her almost more than she does him; next to Jemma’s box of unsent letters is a second box lovingly filled with all of Fitz’s letters. He tells her about his lectures, writes her quotes from the new books he’s studying and writes vivid descriptions of Boston and all the places he’ll show her when she comes, because she  _will_  come. Eventually.

Jemma re-reads his letters nightly, and falls asleep holding his promises close to her heart.

‘I don’t care if it wouldn’t be fair,’ Lance says bluntly, ‘and neither would Fitz. I may not be his best friend, but I certainly know him well enough to know that he would  _want_  to know if something was wrong with you. No matter what.’

Jemma shakes her head, feeling her throat start to prickle.

‘Even so,’ she says thickly. ‘I don’t think I could ever tell him now. I don’t…I don’t know if I could find the words.’

Sniffing, she brings up a hand to brush quickly at her cheeks, trying to bat away the tears before Lance sees them. By the way he sinks heavily into the sofa next to her, she realises her attempts must have been futile.

‘You’ve spoken to Fitz almost every day of your life,’ Lance says, ‘often  _all_  day, and about everything. How can you not have the words  _now_?’

Jemma shrugs, dropping her hands to her sides and staring straight ahead.

‘I don’t know,’ she whispers.

Lance is quiet for a moment, before sighing and getting to his feet. He moves back into the kitchen and Jemma hears him resume his slicing, the sound of the knife making swift, regular notes against the chopping board. She sniffs and wipes her face again, inwardly cursing her constantly imbalanced hormones.

‘Put your feet up.’

Jemma blinks, and tries to turn around before stopping short when she realises she can no longer swivel as far as she used to.

‘I  _beg_  your pardon?’

‘You heard me.’ Lance refuses to look directly at her, and instead reaches up to pluck a bowl off a shelf. ‘There’s a perfectly good chair in front of you, sweetheart. Use it. Leg elevation reduces ankle swelling.’

Jemma screws up her nose. ‘How do  _you_  know that?’

Lance makes a noncommittal gesture with his hand. ‘I must have read it somewhere.’

At this, Jemma does turn towards him, as far as she can before her stomach gets in the way, and gives him an incredulous look.

‘Have you…been  _researching_  pregnancy?’ When Lance doesn’t reply, she gives a short gasp of disbelief. ‘All those books on the landing…‘What To Expect When You’re Expecting’ and such like…the ones I thought Daisy bought around as a hint for me… _you_  bought them didn’t you? And you’ve been  _reading_  them?’

‘Yes, yes I have,’ Lance says grimly. ‘Seeing as my sister doesn’t have her baby’s father involved in her pregnancy and she refuses to let me hunt him down and drag him back here, and she’s also refusing to tell her best friend anything at all, that leaves only me to look after her. So…’ He waltzes back into the living room and hands her a bowl with a heavily pointed look, taking the jar of Nutella out of her reach. ‘I’m looking after her.’

He turns back into the kitchen to clean up and Jemma glances at the bowl in her hands. It’s filled with freshly cut fruits rich in fibre, all cut into bite-size pieces so she only has to lift them to her mouth to eat them.

She finds that her eyes are once more swimming with tears, this time at the idea that Lance, her older brother and frequent tormentor and teaser over the years, is now taking it upon himself to become her caretaker. Begrudgingly perhaps, but even so.

Almost as if he’d felt her tears come back, Lance wanders back into the living room, his hands stuck deep into his jeans’ pockets.

‘He’d want to be here,’ he reminds her and there is no need for him to say a name for Jemma to know exactly who he is referring to.

Lance leans over the sofa and presses a quick kiss to her forehead, before giving her a final lopsided grin and leaving the room.

After he leaves, Jemma sits still, thinking. Then, she carefully unfolds the letter for Fitz she has just written, the one he will never receive, and opens it up to re-read it. Her fingers trace over the words, feeling the brutal, raw honesty seep off of the page as she reads, and for a moment she allows herself to imagine herself sending the letter and Fitz reading every word of it. She wonders what would happen next if she did.

Shaking her head, Jemma folds the letter back up again. She’ll add it to the rest of unsent letters tonight when she hauls herself up the stairs to bed.

Sighing, she leans back into the sofa cushions and finds herself eying the chair in front of her, so conveniently placed for her to rest her feet on. Lance’s words repeat in her head, and she swallows hard, her hands resting lightly on top of her belly, and the beating heart that was sleeping inside.

Slowly, Jemma lifts her feet with their (only  _mildly_ , thank you very much) swollen ankles up to place them carefully on the seat of the chair.

 

**11:23am, 10 th** **July 2005**

‘Alright, alright!’ Jemma yells through the house as the doorbell rings once more. ‘I’m coming!’

She huffs, throwing the small pink babygrow back onto the pile of similarly pink laundry sitting on the sofa and hopping over a stray teddy bear to head for the front door. A thin wail of protest stops her in her tracks, and Jemma groans as she turns back into the living room where her daughter, who had only moments before been lying asleep on a patchwork quilt on the floor, is reaching for her.

Jemma feels a tug inside her chest and instantly bends down to sweep her up into her arms, tucking her onto her hip, placing a feathery kiss to the top of her head.

The doorbell rings again.

‘We’re coming!’ she calls irritably, hopping out into the hall, before murmuring to the baby, who had quietened the moment she was in her mother’s arms: ‘Honestly, Hope, some people just do not have any respect for nap time, do they, darling?’

In response, Hope reaches out for a strand of Jemma’s hair to suck.

With an affectionate huff in her baby’s direction, Jemma quickly takes the chain off the door, flicking the latch off and pulls the door open, only to find Fitz standing on her doorstep with a bunch of yellow carnations held in his hands.

Jemma stares, her hand held frozen on the door and her heart in her mouth. Her mind has gone blank and she is sure that if Hope wasn’t clinging on so tightly to her t-shirt, she might slip out of her arms altogether. This thought is enough to jog her out of her respite and she swallows, shifting Hope to sit more securely on her hip.

Was it the summer already? Was he home for the holidays? How had the time slipped by her so easily that she hadn’t even noticed it passing?

In front of her, Fitz is standing firmly on the step, his feet a good shoulders width apart. There is some kind of determination in his features, a steadiness in his eyes and his mouth is almost grimly set. There is no shock in his face, though, no surprise, and certainly nothing like what you would expect from a person who was just discovering that their best friend has had a baby during their absence.

Jemma rolls her eyes and places her hand on her free hip.

‘Well, at the very least you could  _act_ surprised.’

‘My God,’ Fitz replies blandly. ‘You have a baby.’

Jemma purses her lips together and detangles Hope’s fingers from her hair. ‘Lance told you,’ she guesses.

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Fitz says, but the twitching in his left hand tells Jemma that he’s lying. ‘I came home early for the holidays, I didn’t tell you because I wanted to surprise you. Until you opened this door, I had absolutely no idea that she…’ Here, he falters slightly and his eyes fall on Hope. ‘…that she existed.’

Jemma glances down at her daughter, who is wearing a sky blue babygrow with a bright orange tiger stitched on the front.

‘How did you know she’s a she?’ she asks with a raise of her eyebrow.

Fitz winces. ‘Lucky guess?’

‘You’re a terrible liar, Leopold Fitz.’

‘I’ve got nothing on you, Jemma Simmons.’

Jemma feels her shoulders slump, her lips moving into a mirror image of his smile as she watches him. It feels odd, having him back in front of her again; after so long spent apart, their only forms of communication being via texts and letters that had decreased in length month by month, she had expected him to feel like something of a stranger to her, for there to be a kind of awkwardness between them.

Instead, even though Fitz’s hair has lost a little bit of its curl and there is a faint shadow of stubble trailing down his face, it feels the way it always has, and Jemma finds herself wanting to hurtle forwards into his arms and wrap herself around him, feeling the tickle of his laughter against her cheek as he pulls her closer, maybe even…

Abruptly, Jemma sucks in a breath and blinks.

_Hormones_ , she decides hastily. Thoughts like that were most definitely caused by hormones.

_Bloody things_.

Fitz clears his throat. ‘So…can I come in?’

Jemma hesitates, but only long enough for her to notice the way her daughter is reaching out for Fitz with her tiny fingers and wide eyes, as if even at four months old, she already knows exactly what it is that she wants.

Jemma exhales slowly and nods, stepping to one side to hold the door open for him.

‘Yeah,’ she whispers with a smile. ‘Always.’

 

 

 

**11:42am, 10 th** **July 2005**

On Fitz’s suggestion, they go outside.

They tug pillows and blankets out of the back door and onto the grass in the garden, layering them over one another to form a cushioning for the hard ground, the way they had done as children to watch the stars. On Jemma’s insistence, Fitz props up an open umbrella next to their nest of blankets, to shelter Hope from the rays of the weak summer sun.

They lie on their fronts on the grass, with Jemma’s arm curved up around her daughter protectively, both their eyes remaining on the squirming baby in front of them.

‘What happened to…to her dad?’ Fitz asks reluctantly. His hand is creeping closer across the blanket, so it is almost brushing against Hope’s side.

‘He left for university,’ Jemma murmurs. ‘Exeter, I think it was. I told him before he left, but I haven’t heard from him since.’

‘Not  _anything_?’

Jemma shakes her head. ‘No.’

Fitz hisses out through his teeth, and Jemma hears him mutter something under his breath that might have been ‘ _bastard_ ’.

She leans forward and nudges him playfully with her shoulder. ‘Language! And around my infant daughter, no less.’

Fitz grimaces. ‘Right, sorry.’ He pokes Hope carefully in her chest, and she lets out a bubble of laughter. ‘Sorry, baby girl.’

Jemma watches the exchange in bemusement; every time she’d asked Lance to stop swearing around Hope he’d scoffed at her, tossed his niece in the air affectionately, and reminded her that it took at least nine months for infants to start retaining memories (‘And you can’t argue,’ he’d added. ‘Seeing as it was  _you_  who told me that.’).

Fitz, on the other hand, seems perfectly happy to humour her and is regarding Hope with a kind of reverence that makes Jemma’s heart feel like it’s swelled to twice its size in her chest.

‘I was going to give her up,’ she confesses quietly.

Fitz turns to her in surprise. ‘You were?’

Jemma nods. ‘I even had all the paperwork done for it. I was going to give her to Social Services, she’d be adopted and I’d move to Boston. To be with you.’

Fitz goes quiet, his fingers tickling at Hope’s side. ‘What changed?’

‘I don’t think I could have ever really gone through with it,’ Jemma admits. ‘I thought that I could, but once she was born and I was holding her in my arms, I just…’

She trails off, remembering those first few hours she’d had with Hope, just the two of them existing in a world filled with the fog of painkillers that no one could breach, no matter how hard they tried. In all fairness, Jemma hadn’t wanted them to. For those first few hours, she’d only had eyes for Hope.

‘I could never give her up,’ she says, her voice coming out unexpectedly fierce. ‘Not ever.’

Fitz nods in understanding, and Jemma notices his throat bob. ‘She’s beautiful.’

‘She is,’ Jemma whispers with pride as she watches her daughter. ‘And I love her.’

It is only as she says these words that she realises how true they really are. She loves Hope and it is as simple as that. She loves her in a way that is all consuming; it is a love that takes over her days, her hours, her minutes. Every beat of her heart is for love of her daughter, and Jemma knows now that she would never have it any other way.

Fitz places the tip of his little finger against Hope’s tiny fist, and she immediately closes her fingers, trapping him against her.

‘Then I love her too,’ he murmurs.

It is a habit left over from their childhood; when one had discovered something new, be it a book, a food or a secret place, and declared their love for it, the other automatically would too. More often than not, the declaration would be genuine as their tastes were similar, but there was the odd time when it was less so. Incidentally, it was often these times when the sentiment was most appreciated – it showed a sense of solidarity, of unison, that they would never let the other stand on their own.

It takes Jemma only one glance to Fitz’s face, and his slightly misty eyes, to know that he means every word he says. She turns her eyes back down to Hope with a smile, feeling a warmth spread through her chest.

After a few minutes, Fitz clears his throat.

‘You should have told me.’

Jemma shakes her head. ‘You seemed so happy over in Boston. I didn’t want to disrupt that for you.’

Fitz groans. ‘ _No_ , Jemma…’ He rubs at his temple. ‘I  _wish_  that you’d told me.’

‘Why?’ Jemma asks. ‘What would you have done?’

‘I don’t know! Been there for you? Held your hair back while you puked, driven you to hospital appointments, picked up peanut butter and apples from the supermarket for you when you were craving them at 2am?’ He looks up at her and Jemma is struck by the sincerity in his eyes. ‘Aren’t those the kind of things you’re supposed to do when your best friend is pregnant?’

_Yes_ , Jemma wants to point out to him,  _but that’s_   _because normal people usually have a baby_ with _their best friend_.

She swallows, hot tears suddenly pricking in her eyes as a wave of bitterness washes over her, momentarily rendering her unable to breathe. Then, she realises what she is doing and shakes it off, blinking her tears away with a sharp gasp.

She’s being ridiculous; she doesn’t wish she’d had a baby with Fitz, of  _course_  she doesn’t. It’s just those bloody hormones again.

She realises that Fitz is watching her, with concern flickering in his eyes, and she gives him a wan smile.

‘I’m sorry,’ she croaks. ‘I should have told you. I suppose I was just…afraid.’

‘It’s okay.’ Fitz moves his free hand to cover hers, giving it a supportive squeeze. ‘I…I understand why you didn’t. And I’m sorry that you felt afraid, and I just wish that I had been there for you.’

Jemma nods, and squeezes his hand back, tangling her fingers between his to feel the pulse beating beneath them. He steadies her, she realises. He always has.

‘Will you be her godfather?’ she asks impulsively.

Fitz’s head jerks towards her, and she watches his entire face light up at the idea. Hope chooses that exact moment to reach upwards with her podgy fists, catching Fitz’s cheek with her fingers and sending him reeling backwards.

Jemma snorts, as the awed expression on his face turns into a startled one, and after a moment Fitz joins her, until they are both laughing, so hard that Hope begins to gurgle with laughter too between them.

‘Yeah,’ he says eventually, and turns back to shake Hope’s tiny hand, his finger still clasped inside it. He is beaming, Jemma notices, with a radiant grin that reaches from ear to ear.

‘I’d love nothing more.’

 

 


	2. the middle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "For years, she had thought that she wanted to travel because she wanted to see new places, because she wanted to explore every corner of the globe and see more of the world than what was right outside her bedroom window. 
> 
> But now, she has to reconsider that because she is standing with Fitz on the edge of the world, and he is so close to her that her heart feels like it’s going to jump out of her chest, and Jemma finds she doesn’t want to go anywhere else."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I started taking artistic liberties with the story in this chapter, so it won't be exactly how you remember from the film but the sentiments remain the same (or so I hope!). 
> 
> I hope you enjoy this chapter.

**4:01pm, 3 rd June 2010**

 

Jemma is sitting at the kitchen table, a letter in her hand, when she hears the door bang. Silently, she starts to count backwards from five in her head, just reaching zero when the kitchen door flies open and a small whirlwind of blue checked summer dress, tangled hair and black t-bar shoes comes hurtling towards her.

‘Mummy! I’m home!’

‘So you are!’ Jemma catches Hope before she can run into her and lifts her up to sit on the chair next to her, pressing a quick kiss to her cheek as she does so. Wrapping her arms around her daughter, Jemma presses a kiss to her cheek. ‘Did you bring Auntie Daisy home with you?’

‘Auntie Daisy’s here,’ Daisy grunts from the doorway, lugging in Hope’s school bag after her. ‘And she really wants to know if you made those cakes you promised you would this morning, because after the day I’ve had, I really need a sugar hit.’

Jemma grins, and nods towards the end of the table. ‘See for yourself.’

She isn’t sure who looks more delighted, her daughter or her friend, as Hope wriggles her way out of her arms to race Daisy to the plate of cakes.

‘Only one before tea!’ she calls out as they both grab one, knowing full well that Daisy will slip an extra one into her pocket, to secrete to Hope later.

It is five years since Hope had been born and Jemma has discovered that five years is both an incredibly long time and yet it is hardly any time at all. During the last five years, lots of things have changed.

Both she and Lance have moved out of their parents’ house: Jemma to the small basement flat of a Victorian terrace where she and Hope now live, and Lance to the master bedroom of his new girlfriend’s house. He and Bobbi’s relationship, as far as Jemma could tell, consisted of multiple passionate encounters, followed by even more passionate arguments. It was this pattern that had led Daisy to declare them “the stereotypical ‘on-off’ relationship” whilst nodding knowingly. When they were ‘on’, Lance lived in Bobbi’s house, went food shopping with her and seemed perfectly happy with the level of domesticity that having a girlfriend provided. When they were ‘off’, he slept on Jemma’s couch. Luckily for both Jemma and Hope, Lance and Bobbi were ‘on’ more often than they were ‘off’.

Jemma had also found a job at the Earl of Doncaster Hotel in the town centre, a prestigious and expensive boutique hotel. She was in maid service, which meant routinely stripping and making beds, wiping down bathroom surfaces and delivering soft toys to the lost and found. It was repetitive work, but it paid good money and she had been promised a promotion to reception in the autumn.

Hope starting school had been a major change as well, both for her and for Jemma’s reluctance to be parted from her. But the local primary school was only a short walk away from the flat, and as of four months ago, she now had a personal escort there and back. Daisy’s job at Marks & Spencer had lasted far longer than any of her previous occupations had but back in December she had decided enough was enough. Coincidentally, around that time the head teacher of Hope’s school had lost her secretary to maternity leave and, upon meeting Daisy at a parent’s evening she’d gone to with Jemma, had offered her a job. It was only temporary, but it was enough to pay her bills whilst Jemma continued to hint to her manager about getting her a position at the Earl of Doncaster.

A lot of the changes over the past few years had been good ones, Jemma had to admit that. There were some, however, that she knew she would really rather have been without.

‘Is that letter from Uncle Fitz?’ Hope asks with her mouth full, eying the letter in Jemma’s hand.

Jemma perks up. ‘Yes, it is! Were you reading it over my shoulder?’

Despite her best intentions at encouragement, Hope was a reluctant reader. She had a perfectly average level of intelligence – as Jemma was assured by her teachers at parent’s evening – she just had little interest in putting in any effort.

(‘And _that_ ,’ Daisy had put in helpfully, ‘is something she most definitely gets from her father.’)

‘No.’ Hope shakes her head. ‘I just recognised his handwriting.’

‘Oh.’

‘Did he send anything for me?’

Jemma smiles at her daughter, and leans back in her chair. ‘Does he ever not?’

Since his appointment as godfather, Fitz had taken his responsibilities very seriously. He had never missed a birthday or a Christmas, and he sent Hope small gifts sporadically throughout the year: trinkets from tacky tourist shops in Boston and DC, stones and shells he’d picked up on beaches where he’d been on holiday or, most recently, proof copies of children’s books he’d gotten from his new job at a publisher’s office. Jemma would read the books to Hope, running her fingers over the words and trying to imagine them being said in his voice. The image in her head sent more shivers running down her spine than she cared to admit.

Most often, though, he would send her a postcard, one from every part of the world he had travelled to over the past five years.

Hope takes the glossy card Jemma is holding out to her and runs her fingers over the image on the front.

‘Where’s this?’

 Jemma stifles the urge to encourage her to read what it says at the bottom of the card and tells her: ‘it’s the carousel in Central Park, in New York. Do you want to put it on the map?’

Hope nods, and drags a chair across the kitchen to the wall where their giant map of the world is mounted. On the map are pinned dozens of postcards of places where Fitz has visited, spread out to each corner of the globe, with red strings mapping out his journeys.

‘There are too many,’ Hope complains, ‘in New York.’ She struggles for a moment to push the pin into place; the small spot of the edge of the USA on their map was heaving with thick, glossy snaps of all the usual tourist attractions. She flicks them disgruntledly. ‘If he sends another one, they won’t all fit.’

Jemma tilts her head to one side. ‘I was thinking we could get a map of New York too, a big one like the world map. That way we could spread out the postcards and see where all the places he sends are in relation to one another.’

Hope’s eyes light up and she nods eagerly, before slithering off the chair and padding back over to the table.

‘When is he coming home?’ she asks, pointing to the letter in Jemma’s hand. ‘Does he say?’

Jemma takes a deep breath and pins an apologetic look to her face. ‘Actually, darling, Uncle Fitzy’s not coming home. Not this year.’

Across the table, Daisy raises her eyebrows, and Hope stares at her mother, crestfallen. ‘He’s…not coming?’

Before this year, Fitz had come home every summer, from the end of June to the beginning of September. In a way, he had become the means by which Jemma measured the year: the time when Fitz was with her, and the time when he wasn’t. Hope, it seemed, had done the same thing.

Whenever he was home, Fitz spent most of his time with the two of them. Daisy and Lance made appearances periodically, but for the most part it was just the three of them, for long summer days that felt to Jemma like they could stretch on forever. It had been Fitz who had first taught Hope to ride her tricycle two summers ago, Fitz who had driven them both to the swimming pool where Hope had splashed her way between the two of them in her armbands. He was the only person Hope would voluntarily read for.

All of a sudden, Jemma finds herself holding back tears, and she folds his letter up in her hands.

Daisy clears her throat pointedly.

‘Sweetie?’ she says to Hope. ‘Didn’t you have homework tonight?’

Hope examines her fingers nonchalantly. ‘No…’

‘Really?’ Daisy crosses her arms and shoots the little girl a look. ‘I could have sworn I heard your teacher give the announcement as I walked by your classroom this afternoon, but…’

‘Oh, right!’ Hope scrambles for her schoolbag guiltily. ‘ _That_ homework.’

Scooping her bag off the ground, and swiping another cake from the plate which Jemma chooses to ignore, she disappears into the rest of the flat. Daisy smiles, satisfied, and drops down into the chair next to Jemma at the table.

‘Spill,’ she orders.

Jemma sighs, and opens the envelope in front of her. ‘He’s not coming home,’ she murmurs, sliding an airline ticket out of the envelope, ‘but he wants _me_ to go over _there_.’

Daisy gasps. ‘He sent you a ticket?’

Jemma nods and offers it to her. Daisy snatches it and quickly scans the ticket before peering over the top of it at her.

‘You’re going, right?’

Hesitantly, Jemma takes the ticket back from her and places it face down on the table. ‘I, um…I don’t think so. I don’t think I could.’

‘You don’t think you _could_?’ Daisy’s eyes bug. ‘You can’t be serious, Jemma.’

‘What do you mean?’

Daisy rolls her eyes and pulls her chair to the side so she can take both of Jemma’s hands in hers. She squeezes them tightly.

‘Jemma, listen. I have been friends with you for five years. I love your daughter like she was my own blood niece, and I tolerate your brother as much as any sane person on this earth could. I love you, and I know that you live for those weeks in the summer when you see him.’

Jemma’s gaze flicks down to the table, and the ticket lying there and she bites her lip.

‘It’s okay,’ Daisy whispers, squeezing her hands again. ‘It’s okay to feel like that. But you know what’s not okay? Denying yourself the chance to see him and be happy, just for some obscure reason that I can’t even imagine.’

‘It’s a perfectly reasonable reason,’ Jemma puts in. ‘He has a girlfriend now…’ She gives a sharp intake of breath before continuing. ‘He has a beautiful, talented, accomplished girlfriend who has travelled the world with him and seen things that I’ve only ever dreamed about seeing and…’

‘She could be Angelina Jolie for all I care,’ Daisy says bluntly. ‘She’s not _you_.’

Jemma shifts uncomfortably in her seat and slides her hands out from underneath Daisy’s.

‘It would be weird, that’s all,’ she says thickly. ‘To finally meet her. To…to see them together.’

‘Because you’re in love with him.’

Alarmed, Jemma looks up at Daisy, who raises an eyebrow as if daring her friend to contradict her. It comes as a bit of a shock to Jemma when she finds that she _can’t_.

Somehow, without her noticing, she’s spent the last five years falling in love with her best friend. In between watching him play with her daughter, laughing on park benches with him and spending long hours poring over his letters, she had started to imagine how it would feel to have his hands touch her, his lips kiss her and his words profess how much he loved her.

If Jemma is honest with herself, it is quite possible that she had begun to fall for him many years before, but that was only a technicality. No matter which way she looks at it, the fact remains the same.

She is in love with Fitz. She is in love with her best friend.

‘Exactly,’ Jemma says after a while, her voice shaking. ‘Exactly right.’ She takes a deep breath before continuing. ‘Which is why it would feel weird, and awkward, and _wrong_ for me to go over there when I feel this way!’

Daisy snorts and leans forward to twist her friend’s chair, so Jemma has no choice but to look at her.

‘No offence, Jemma, but you had a _baby_ without telling him, remember? I know that you might find this weird, but trust me: when it comes to weird, you and Fitz are two perfectly weird, perfectly perfect for each other peas-in-a-pod.’

‘But he has a girlfriend,’ Jemma repeats dumbly. ‘That hasn’t changed.’

‘I know it hasn’t,’ Daisy says softly. ‘But, Jemma, like I said: she isn’t _you_. And, deep down, I think Fitz knows that too.’

Jemma sinks back in her seat and chews at her bottom lip, her gaze drawn once more to the airline ticket lying on the kitchen table. As simple as it looks, she knows that it could be her gateway to a whole new world, if only she is brave enough to let it.

She feels Daisy’s eyes watching her, and when she looks up the sad smile her friend is wearing makes her feel a pang in the centre of her chest. Reaching across her, Daisy plucks the ticket from the table and places it firmly in Jemma’s hands.

‘Go and see him,’ she instructs, before getting up from the table and pinching another cake from the plate next to her.

She sweeps out of the kitchen with a wink, and Jemma watches her go before turning her attention back to the ticket.

She rolls it over in her hands, and thinks.

 

 

 

**6:34am, 18 th August 2010**

 

The flight from Doncaster Sheffield airport to JFK, New York, had been long and when Jemma steps off of the plane she’s spent the last eight hours on she feels tired, achy and mildly nauseous with anticipation.

All of those feelings disappear though, when she trudges out into Arrivals and her eyes fall upon a single figure, standing alone amongst the throngs of other people making their way across the airport. Fitz is holding up a card with her name on, and when he sees her, he grins and steps forward.

Before she knows quite what she is doing, Jemma breaks into a run, picking up speed the closer she gets to him and the wider she sees Fitz’s smile become. She only just has time to drop her rucksack to the ground before she is springing at him, flinging her arms around his neck and pulling him close. The force of her hug might have been enough to knock Fitz to the ground had he not been prepared for it. He had bent down slightly to allow her to reach his neck, and now as he straightens up he lifts her with him, so that her feet are dangling off the ground. Jemma can feel his heart hammering against his chest through his shirt, and it makes her laugh, to know that he is just as giddy with delight as she is.

It feels like a long time before Fitz lets her slide back down to the ground again, but even when he does he doesn’t step away from her so that they are still pressed almost chest to chest. Jemma is acutely aware of how close he is to her, so close that she can see every freckle on his cheek and every fleck of blue in his eyes. She has a phenomenal urge to reach up and kiss him, to cup his face with her hands and pull him against her to feel his lips caress hers.

It would be so easy to do too; a simple upward motion and a leap of faith, and her entire world would be changed forever.

When Fitz finally steps backwards, keeping her in front of him but putting an arm’s length distance between them, Jemma realises she has been holding her breath.

Fitz is beaming at her, his face riddled with joy.

‘There is,’ he says breathlessly, ‘so much that I want to show you.’

Jemma bends down to retrieve her rucksack, feeling only the slightest flutter of disappointment in her gut. Straightening up, she tucks her hand tightly into Fitz’s, and grins.

‘So show me.’

 

 

 

**8:51pm, 18 th August 2010**

The late summer sun is bathing New York in a hazy pink light, and as Jemma wanders around the balcony at the top of the Empire State Building she can see the twinkling of lights begin to shine through the city, making it look like it is stars spread out before her instead of buildings.

She turns a corner so she is staring out at the East River, its waters shimmering in the half-light of dusk, and stops to lean her elbows on the railings. From her vantage point high above the city, she has been able to identify all the places Fitz had taken her today, and all the things they’d done.

Fitz had insisted, in a fit of gallantry upon leaving the airport, that he carry her rucksack for her. Jemma had agreed, partly because the offer touched her, and partly because it was easier for her to take photographs without her hiker-sized bag on her back. He had first taken her to Central Park, where they had spent hours meandering along the paths and talking, before taking a ride on the same carousel he’d sent them a postcard of. Spinning in circles with Fitz on a brown painted horse with a golden mane next to her, explaining about the history of the ride, Jemma had felt dizzy in more ways than one.

After Central Park, they’d caught the subway up to Times Square and gone into the Disney Store to choose a toy for Hope. Jemma had picked out a small, soft beany toy of Marie from the Aristocats (her current favourite) after intense deliberation and then pretended not to notice Fitz purchase a matching Toulouse toy while she zipped her carrier bag into the rucksack on his back. She knew that in a week’s time, that same toy would be plopping through her letterbox in a jiffybag with Hope’s name on it.

He’d then taken her to Chinatown for food, and the two of them had ended up sitting in a café that was really only big enough to seat two people, eating steaming hot dumplings and drinking bubble tea, which Jemma was disappointed to learn contained no real tea at all.

And now here they are, ending their day of exploring at the top of the most famous building in New York, with the entire city spread below them to watch. Fitz is still inside the main observation room, talking to a security guard about subway closures, and when Jemma turns back she can see him through the glass, his muffled words accompanied with arm gestures.

There are only a few couples still roaming around the terrace at this point in the evening and Jemma watches them move around one another, their hands constantly touching and their bodies angling towards one another even when they are facing the view. Nibbling at her bottom lip, Jemma turns away.

‘Hey.’

She looks up as Fitz walks towards her, his hands sunk low in his pockets. She smiles and leans away from the railings.

‘Hey.’

‘So, what do you think?’ Fitz nods towards the view. ‘About all this?’

Jemma stares out at the city in front of her, struggling for the words.

‘There’s a lot of it,’ she decides on eventually.

And it’s true. The dog-eared pages of her childhood atlas hadn’t prepared her for the vast scale the world was on; just this one city was bigger than anything Jemma had ever known. She and Fitz had roamed its streets for fourteen hours straight and still they had only seen a fraction of what New York had to offer.

Seeing it all spread out before her now, feeling like the whole world is just beyond her grasp, Jemma feels rather small.

‘Yeah,’ Fitz agrees, leaning against the rail next to her to gaze out at the lights and streets below. ‘Back in Doncaster, I don’t think I ever truly believed there could be this much life in the world, however much you tried to tell me otherwise. But now I’m here. And I love it.’

He looks across at her expectantly, and Jemma knows exactly what she is supposed to say.

_Then I love it too_ is on the tip of her tongue, but she hesitates over the words and ends up swallowing them instead. Fitz watches her falter and looks away again, the disappointment in his face making Jemma’s chest tighten with guilt.

She wants to find the words to explain it to him, to explain how it’s not that she doesn’t think New York is beautiful – she does, she thinks it’s wonderful, and it’s a place she’s wanted to explore since she was a little girl. But now she’s here, standing in the twilight gazing down at the city that never sleeps as its lights illuminate the evening, she can’t help but wonder if that’s what she’d wanted after all.

Jemma closes her eyes and thinks back, back to the ‘dream’, back to her bedroom and her atlas and her and Fitz’s fingers tracing out the patterns of their future on its pages. She remembers her trembling excitement for it, and the ache she’d felt deep in her gut, the ache of longing for something more.

Fitz moves towards her slightly against the railing, so that they are pressed shoulder to shoulder, their skin barely brushing against each other. Jemma inhales, feeling the tickle of his breath against her temple, and realises she is feeling that ache again.

For years, she had thought that she wanted to travel because she wanted to see new places, because she wanted to explore every corner of the globe and see more of the world than what was right outside her bedroom window.

But now, she has to reconsider that because she is standing with Fitz on the edge of the world, and he is so close to her that her heart feels like it’s going to jump out of her chest, and Jemma finds she doesn’t want to go anywhere else.

Maybe she has already found what she wants. And maybe it has been beside her the whole damn time.

She isn’t sure how much longer they stand there before Fitz carefully nudges her arm with his, but when she opens her eyes she finds that night is starting to fall and instead of the lights below her being simply a string of stars, now they are entire galaxies.

‘Come on,’ Fitz murmurs, resting one hand into the small of her back to guide her away from the rails. ‘It’s time to go home.’

They are in the lift on their way back down to the ground before Jemma realises he hadn’t been talking about Doncaster.

 

 

 

**9:39pm, 19 th August 2010**

 

Jemma takes the glass of champagne that is being handed to her by the man behind the bar, remembering only at the last minute that she doesn’t need to pay him. Here, at this art exhibit by a friend of Fitz’s girlfriend being held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, all the drinks are complimentary.

That is not to say that this makes Jemma feel any more comfortable. On the contrary, her uneasy is growing with every passing minute, and it isn’t just the fact that she had hardly packed for a function like this that is grating on her.

Fitz’s girlfriend had offered to loan her something to wear to the event, but everything in her wardrobe had appeared to be incredibly expensive, highly glittery and made for someone much taller and thinner than Jemma was, so she had politely declined. Secretly, she thinks Fitz’s girlfriend had been very relieved about that.

Jemma lifts her glass to her lips, and then brings it away again without taking a sip.

She is watching Fitz’s girlfriend laugh across the room; she tips back her head as she does so, to show each and every one of her pearly white teeth. As sugary sweet as she pretends to be, Jemma doesn’t feel comfortable around her. Her voice grates, her gaze is condescending and she is evidently very jealous about Jemma’s presence in her house.

Oh, and apparently she is also pregnant.

Which only makes Jemma feel all the worse for disliking her.

Sighing, Jemma tightens her fingers on her glass as she watches the woman across the room. Clearly she is still angry with Fitz about the incident at dinner, when she had snapped at him for dripping wine on the antique table and he had made some snide comment about how much it had cost. She had tipped the table over in front of the both of them with a guttural shriek, and yet now she is draping herself over the smirking artist of the exhibit while hanging off his every word as if none of it had ever happened.

Fitz, by contrast, is nowhere to be seen.

Jemma can’t help but wonder why Fitz hadn’t told her his girlfriend was pregnant. They had spent almost two full days together, she was _staying_ with the two of them and yet he had completely neglected to mention it. Even though she is very aware of the irony of her brooding over why Fitz hadn’t told her he was having a baby, she can’t stop thinking about it.

Still with her glass in her hand, Jemma weaves her way through the main auditorium to where the art is being exhibited. Even the paintings themselves make her feel uncomfortable. They are filled with sharp edges and blunt lines, painted in colours so dull and drab that she can hardly tell where one ends and another begins. To her, this isn’t art. Art is the drawings Hope brings home from school, so saturated with colour that you can hardly see the white of the paper anymore, drawing that are pinned to the fridge with novelty magnets and right now is the only art Jemma wishes she could see.

All of a sudden, her eyes fill with tears and she sniffs, bringing her hand up to her face to wipe at her cheeks. She staggers back towards a table and sets her glass of untouched champagne down, grabbing her jacket and bag from the cloakroom as she leaves.

_This was a mistake_.

The more she thinks about it, the more she is convinced; this whole trip had been a mistake, a terrible mistake, the worst mistake, oh god, why had she let Daisy and Lance talk her into making this horrible, terrible _mistake_ …

‘ _Jemma!_ ’

She is half way down the steps of the museum when his voice reaches her, and even though she doesn’t want to, she stops and turns towards him. Fitz is running down towards her, worry written across every line of his face.

‘Where are you going?’ He stops short when he sees the tears on her face and reaches out to touch her. ‘What is it, what’s wrong? Did something happen?’

Jemma easily side steps him and shakes her head. ‘No, nothing’s happened. I just want to go home.’

‘Okay.’ Fitz straightens up and glances down at the street below them. ‘Okay. We’ll all go, then. I’ll grab a cab to take us back…’

‘No, Fitz,’ Jemma says wearily. ‘I want to go home, to _my_ home and to _my_ daughter.’

She can feel the tears she is trying so hard to hold back start to flow freely down her face, rolling off her cheeks and down onto her dress because she is doing nothing to wipe them away. Fitz hovers, the uncertainty in his body language telling Jemma he doesn’t know quite what to do – to go with her, or return back inside to his pregnant girlfriend.

‘Alright,’ he says eventually, clenching his hands into fists. ‘If you just wait here, I’ll have to go back inside to find…’

He starts to turn away, and Jemma bites the inside of her cheek before making an impulsive decision.

‘She’s not right for you, you know.’

Fitz pauses and looks back at her over his shoulder, his eyes narrowed.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘She’s not right, Fitz, and I’m pretty sure you know exactly what I mean by that,’ Jemma says, feeling herself start to tremble.

‘No, actually,’ he says, taking a step towards her and crossing his arms over his chest defensively. ‘I’m not sure that I do.’

Raising her hand towards him, Jemma counts on her shaking fingers. ‘Firstly, as far as I can tell you have nothing in common besides living in the same house. Second, you didn’t even want to tell me that you were having a _baby_ with her, and that alone is very telling and I know that from experience.’

Fitz opens his mouth to reply, but the words are spilling out of Jemma’s mouth by now and she ploughs on before he can interject.

‘I haven’t seen you touch her _once_ since I’ve been here and she goes out of her way to frustrate and belittle you. She talks down to you like you were a child instead of her boyfriend, which is in itself is highly ironic I might add, seeing as she has ignored you all evening in what appears to be a very childish attempt at punishment!’

She stops to suck in a breath and watches as Fitz pinches the bridge of his nose, his eyes screwed tightly shut and his mouth twisted into a terse line. Clenching her hands into fists, Jemma finds herself trembling.

They have had fights before – all friends have – but there is something that feels different about this one. This one feels like it is hitting far too close to home.

Around them, the sounds of New York City at night hum faintly, like even the streets have hushed to hear what they have to say.

‘You’re my best friend, Fitz.’ Jemma says quietly. ‘And I want you to be with the person you think is right for you. I just can’t see how it’s _her_.’

Fitz gives a sharp laugh and lowers his hand to look straight at her, his eyes piercing under the harsh street lights.

‘What, like you could see that Hope’s father was the right person for _you_?’

It feels like a slap in the face, and Jemma reels backwards, almost losing her footing on the step. Fitz’s words hang heavily between them, and as Jemma feels her eyes fill with tears again, Fitz’s widen in horror as he realises he has gone too far.

‘I…I shouldn’t have said that.’

‘No,’ Jemma says thickly. ‘No, you shouldn’t have.’

Shouldering her bag, she turns away from him to hurry down the remaining steps, praying that the tears blurring her vision don’t cause her to trip and fall. She has barely started moving before she hears a second set of footsteps start to follow her urgently.

‘Jemma! Jemma, stop!’ Their footsteps land on the pavement at exactly the same time. ‘I’m sorry. I should never have said that. Please, just stop and we’ll go home and talk…’

‘I _am_ going home, Fitz,’ Jemma groans, spinning back around to face him. ‘I’m going to advance my ticket and fly home tonight. I just…I can’t stay. I’m sorry.’

Standing in front of her, Fitz’s tie is askew and one of his laces is undone, and for a moment he looks just as young and lost as he had done in the airport all those years before, when she’d held him tight before letting him go. It makes Jemma feel as if her heart is going to give out.

They have had many goodbyes over the years. They have said goodbye in airports, in restaurants and on doorsteps. But all those goodbyes had never meant ‘goodbye’, not really. No matter what, Jemma had always felt that somehow they would find their way back to each other. This time, though, she is not so sure, and if this really is their last goodbye, then she can’t let him go like this.

Taking a deep breath, she steps forwards and raises her head to look at him, hoping with all she has that he can see the sincerity in her eyes.

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispers. ‘I shouldn’t have said what I did either. It wasn’t helpful, and you’re right. I, of all people, didn’t have the right to say it to you.’

‘Please,’ Fitz murmurs, reaching out to take her hands in his, as if he knows what she means to do next. ‘Jemma, please stop.’

Jemma swallows hard, and neatly slides her hands out from beneath his to cover them, trapping them between her palms so her thumbs can softly stroke the skin underneath. The gesture seems to freeze Fitz, who is staring down at their clasped hands as if they were the only things in the world.

‘You’re going to be the best father ever, Fitz,’ Jemma says carefully. ‘I always knew you would be.’

Fitz exhales with what might have been a sob, and Jemma steps forward, still holding his hands, to kiss his cheek. The skin there seems to pucker as she does so, almost like he is crumpling with the effort not to cry. As Jemma pulls away, letting her hands fall back down to her sides, she hopes she hasn’t left a tear on his cheek too.

She wants to say goodbye, to hear her mouth cup the words to give them to him, to finally let him go. But she can’t. The words get stuck in her throat until she feels like she is choking on them, and in the end, Jemma has to give up.

Even after all this time, it seems she still can’t let him go.

(Maybe she never will.)

With one final tilt of her chin and a watery smile that it takes all her remaining strength to give to him, Jemma turns away from Fitz and onto the streets of Manhattan. The pavement in front of her blurs and fades as she walks, so all she can concentrate on is placing one foot in front of the other to keep her upright. Behind her, there are no footsteps and no voice calling her name.

Fitz, it seems, has no trouble at all when it comes to letting her go.

Jemma manages to hold her tears in during the cab ride to the airport, where she advances her return ticket home and gets a seat on the first flight back to Doncaster-Sheffield Airport at 2:02am the next morning. She manages to keep herself together in the passengers lounge, long enough for her to text Lance, international rates be damned, to tell him about her change of plans and ask if he’d be so kind as to pick her up from the airport. _Please_ , she adds to the text before she sends it.

She manages to smile as she passes the airhostess on the plane, and say ‘thank you’ when she is wished a safe flight. She manages to make quiet small talk with the businessman she is seated next to for the flight during their ascent, and as soon as the seat-buckle light above their head goes out, she politely asks if he would step aside to let her out. She walks, on trembling legs to the back of the plane to the cubicle bathroom and steps inside, locking the door behind her.

There, on the cold floor of an airplane bathroom with her back against the door, Jemma finally allows herself to cry; great, uncontrollable sobs that are lost under the steady thrum of the plane’s engines and the empty expanse of the sky.

 

 

 

**1:46pm, 14 th December 2010**

 

‘What about this one?’

Jemma glances up from the flat-packed cardboard box she is struggling to assemble. Across the room, Hope is holding up a baby-sized pink dress with a lacy skirt for her approval.

Smiling fondly at her daughter, Jemma tilts her head to one side. ‘No, darling. Uncle Fitzy doesn’t know whether his baby will be a little boy or a little girl yet; we need to send him things that either could wear. So that means no dresses, unfortunately.’

‘Oh.’ Hope’s little forehead creases in disappointment and she dives back into a pile of her baby clothes, spread out on the floor in front of her. Within seconds, she has something new in her hand and lifts it high triumphantly. ‘Like this one?’

The little babygrow she is holding up is sky blue, with a bright orange tiger stitched on the front. Jemma blinks at it for a moment, before scrambling to her feet to take it from her daughter’s hands.

‘No! I mean… _yes_ ,’ she amends, flashing Hope a quick smile when she looks up at her curiously. ‘Exactly like this one, darling, just…not _this_ one. I think I’d like to keep this one.’

Hope seems to think nothing of this, and returns to the piles of her baby things spread around the room, picking up tiny cardigans and booties and exclaiming about how small she had been. It makes Jemma smile to hear her, and her thumbs rub absently against the soft cotton of the babygrow in her hands as the memory of that long ago summer day she’d spent with Fitz, with Hope lying between them, washes over her.

Carefully, she folds the babygrow and sets it in a drawer.

There is a rap on the front door, and Jemma hears Lance’s voice call through the flat.

‘Oi! Anybody in?’

‘We’re in Hope’s room!’ she calls back, dusting off her jeans and stepping over a heap of baby booties to reach the door to greet him.

Lance meets her at the doorway, beaming, and he reaches over to peck her cheek. His relationship with Bobbi is even steadier nowadays than it had been in the summer, making him cheerier than he has been for years, and it is only very recently that Jemma has stopped secretly envying him for it.

‘How’s my favourite sister?’

‘I’m your only sister,’ Jemma reminds him, but she leans into the kiss anyway, tipping her chin up to receive it.

‘Which means you don’t have to be afraid of any competition for the position, sweetheart.’

‘What about me?’ Hope demands, barrelling between the two of them to tap at Lance’s kneecap indignantly. ‘Am I your favourite niece?’

Lance’s face splits into a grin as he bends down to scoop her up, tossing her in the air like he had done when she was a baby, much to her delight.

‘Absolutely,’ he declares, strolling into the bedroom to place a giggling Hope back down on the floor. ‘You are absolutely my favourite niece, sunshine.’

Hope beams at him, before turning her attention to the stack of picture books on the dresser, picking them up one by one and carefully deliberating before adding them to either her ‘keep’ pile or her ‘send to Fitz’ pile. The former, Jemma notes, rises a lot higher than the latter.

‘So,’ she says cheerily, as Lance flops down onto Hope’s narrow trundle bed, making the mattress shudder under his weight. ‘To what do we owe the pleasure?’

Lance snorts. ‘What, I can’t come visit my beautiful sister and gorgeous niece without having some kind of ulterior motive?’

‘You _can_ ,’ Jemma allows, shooting him a sly grin, ‘but you don’t.’

Lance places one hand over his heart with a wounded expression. ‘I’m hurt, Jem, truly. It pains me that you think so little of me, even after all these years.’

Jemma rolls her eyes at the melodramatics of this statement and sinks down to her knees to continue slotting together the cardboard box in front of her. After a moment watching her struggle, Lance does the same and he takes the box from her to finish it.

‘But now that you mention it,’ he ventures cautiously, not looking up from his work, ‘Bobbi did ask me to find out what time you want her to come and pick Hope up on Saturday.’

When Jemma looks up at him with a victorious grin, he quickly adds, ‘not that I wasn’t planning on coming to visit you two anyway. It just so happens that, while I’m here, I need to clarify the details of how my girlfriend and I will take care of my niece while you’re on your honeymoon.’

Jemma scoffs. ‘I don’t know if you can really call a week in Brighton a month after your wedding a ‘honeymoon’.’

 ‘You’re going away, with the man you insisted on marrying at incredibly short notice a month ago, to presumably have some romantic time alone together. It’s close enough to a honeymoon for me.’

‘I didn’t _insist_ on marrying him,’ Jemma protests. ‘I _wanted_ to marry him.’

Lance’s nostrils flare, and it makes her feel ever so slightly irked. Her brother has never been openly critical about her new husband, not when she had started seeing him or in the weeks after their engagement or even the days leading up to the wedding, but it is plain as day to Jemma that he doesn’t like him and that he doesn’t know if this was the right choice for her. He’d made _that_ perfectly clear as he’d been walking her up the aisle and whispered in her ear that it still wasn’t too late to change her mind. Logically, Jemma knows that he had said it because he cared about her, but there had been something uncertain in his voice that had only made her want to be stubbornly more certain.

She lets go off the box to touch at the band on her left ring finger, twisting it around and around, an act that has become something of a nervous tick ever since she started wearing it. The ring is gold, and slots next to a silver engagement ring on her finger with a small diamond set in the middle. The two rings don’t sit together well at all, and whenever she moves her hand the jewel clashes against the metal and creates an imprint of itself in her skin.

‘So?’

Jemma blinks. ‘So what?’

‘So, what time do you want Bobbi to pick Hope up?’

‘Um.’ Her fingers fall away from her hand a little too sharply, and she reaches up to tuck a stray strand of hair back behind her ear to find something for them to do. ‘She gets back from school with Daisy at about four, and I expect she’ll need a little time after that to finish packing, so if Bobbi comes at four thirty? Daisy knows what she needs to take so you don’t need to worry.’

‘I’m not worried.’ Lance winks at Hope, who giggles. ‘We’re going to have a fun week, aren’t we sunshine?’

‘By _fun_ ,’ Jemma remarks dryly, ‘I hope you mean helping her with her homework, cooking her meals with three different types of vegetables and getting her to bed by seven thirty.’

Lance’s face falls, confirming Jemma’s suspicions that his plans for his week with Hope had involved watching countless Disney films with her, feeding her endless cartons of ice cream and letting her fall asleep on the sofa with a blanket across her knees.

‘Of course that’s what I mean,’ he says stiffly, carefully avoiding her raised eyebrow. ‘Honestly, Jem. Have a little faith.’

Before Jemma has a chance to open her mouth to retort, Lance flips over the completed cardboard box and presents it to her with a flourish.

‘Et voila,’ he announces in an appalling French accent. ‘One box.’

Jemma takes it from him with a fond eye roll, and places it open on the carpet in front of her.

‘Hope, darling, do you want to start packing? Try putting the picture books at the bottom, so the clothes and toys won’t get so squashed.’

‘What’s with the sudden urge to pack all this away, then?’ Lance asks, before heaving himself to his feet to take a teetering stack of books from Hope’s hands. He carries them over to the box for her and tousles her hair affectionately as he sits back down again. ‘They’re not chucking you out already, sunshine, are they?’

‘No one is chucking anyone out,’ Jemma says, shooting a glare to her brother over her daughter’s head. ‘Tell him what we’re doing, Hope.’

‘We’re sending them to New York,’ Hope announces. She is carefully placing one book after the other into the box, patting them down to check for any creases in the pages. ‘For Uncle Fitz’s baby.’

She bounces back to her feet and patters across the room to continue sifting through the piles of baby clothes on the floor. Lance watches her go before turning to face Jemma, and when he whispers to her, his voice sounds strained.

‘You’re doing _what_?’

‘We’re sending them to Fitz,’ Jemma repeats brightly, heaving herself up off the floor to pad across to the dresser. There, she retrieves a red, white and blue air mail sticker with his New York address printed on it. ‘His girlfriend must be due soon, and I know they’ll appreciate the extra helping hand.’

She removes the sticky backing from the label and places it on the side of the box, smoothing out the edges with her fingertips. When she looks back up, Lance is staring at her.

‘Please tell me you’re joking.’

Jemma bristles and sits up a little straighter, irritated at the disbelief in his tone. ‘I know that the last time Fitz and I saw each other, we didn’t exactly part on the happiest of terms,’ she says quietly. ‘And I know that he’s probably still angry with me, and he has every right to be. But despite all that, he is still my best friend and I want him to be happy, so I don’t see why me sending him things to help with a new baby should come as such a shock to you!’

Lance is still staring at her, and the hollow look behind his eyes starts to unnerve Jemma.

‘When was the last time you heard from him?’ he asks.

The unexpectedness of his question makes Jemma do a double take before she answers.

‘We’ve…barely kept contact after I came back from New York,’ she admits guiltily. ‘I sent a few letters there and he sent a couple of sparse replies back, but I stopped getting those a few months back. Since then, the only time I’ve heard from him was when he RSVP-ed _no_ to the wedding in November.’

Lance groans, covering his face with his hand and rubbing the base of his palms into his eyes. ‘Then he never told you. God, and I told him to, I bloody _told_ him to…’

Alarmed, Jemma sits back on her heels, her heart starting to beat faster. Inside her stomach, anxiety is beginning to tighten and she clutches the edge of the cardboard box in front of her tightly.

‘Never told me what?’ she stammers, and when she is met with silence, she raises her voice: ‘Lance. _What did he never tell me_?’

Lance just shakes his head sadly and pulls out his phone, unlocking it as he speaks. ‘I emailed him a few weeks ago. I originally intended on giving him a piece of my mind over not coming to the wedding, since you were so upset about it. You _were_ , Jemma,’ he says with a pointed look when she opens her mouth to object. ‘You might have fooled everyone else, but I saw your face as we walked down that aisle and he wasn’t there. You were crushed.’

Jemma shuts her mouth, knowing better than to argue with the only other person in the world who could read her as well as Fitz could, and swallows hard.

‘What did he say?’ she croaks.

‘To start with, nothing.’ Lance shrugs, opening up his inbox app. ‘I didn’t get any reply, so I assumed the little bugger was feeling rotten about the whole thing and ignoring me on purpose. Then, a few days ago, he finally emailed back.’

‘To say _what_?’

Lance shakes his head again, before getting to his feet with a deep sigh. Jemma watches in frustration as he walks across to Hope and lifts her up, settling her to sit on his hip, before turning back to face her.

‘I think,’ he says carefully, bending down to hand Jemma his phone, ‘it’s probably best that you do this part for yourself.’

Jemma takes the phone in silence, holding it in her palms in front of her, as Lance carries Hope out of the room. He ruffles her hair as he goes, the way he had done to Hope only minutes before, and before long Jemma hears both their voices in the kitchen.

She allows herself to listen to them for a moment before turning her attention back to the phone. From the kitchen, she can hear the clatter of a saucepan and the clink of eggshell against a glass bowl, both sounds that tell her that Lance is cooking her daughter pancakes.

On his phone screen, she reads that he has 4,372 unread emails in his inbox and buried beneath all of those is an email from Fitz’s address, dated the 10th of December. It’s a reply to Lance’s email from a couple of weeks ago.

Taking a deep breath, Jemma opens the email and starts to read.

 

 

 

**5:27pm, 14 th December 2010**

[To: Fitz, 14:01] _Hi Fitz, it’s me. Lance just showed me your email. I…I don’t know what to say._

 

[To: Fitz, 14:10] _Please don’t be angry with Lance for telling me. He thought I already knew, and I wish I had. Fitz, I wish you’d told me._

 

[To: Fitz, 16:39] _The name you mentioned in your email, the name of the man_ she _ran off with, the man who’s really the father of the baby, it sounded familiar. Wasn’t he the artist we went to the exhibition of in New York? Oh, Fitz_.

 

[To: Fitz, 17:17] _I know I’m probably the last person you want to talk to right now, Fitz, but please. Let me know when you get these messages. Please let me know that you’re alright._

 

 

It is a very difficult thing to explain to your six year old daughter why a man who was going to be a daddy is now no longer going to be one. It is an even more difficult thing to explain when you have to tell her that the baby he was going to be a daddy to is still going to be born.

Venturing into this tentative conversation with Hope leads Jemma to have to have a very different conversation with her, and one that she would much rather have had at a later date. She struggles through it as best she can, using a variety of anatomy books and diagrams and one rather sacrificial banana for a visual aid.

Later, when they are eating the said banana together, Hope wordlessly clambers up into Jemma’s lap and loops her arms around her mother’s neck, tucking her thumb into her mouth, something she hasn’t done since she was a baby. Jemma folds her arms around her daughter, taking comfort in her weight and her warmth and her wonderful realness, and kisses the top of her head.

‘I think,’ Hope mumbles into her shirt, ‘that Uncle Fitz must be very unhappy right now.’

‘Yes,’ Jemma whispers back, feeling a lump appear in her throat. ‘Yes, I think he probably is.’

Absently, she starts to rock Hope back and forth, carefully stroking her hair in the way that always sends her daughter to sleep. It is only when she hears Hope start to snuffle that Jemma realises she is finding it very hard not to cry too.

 

 

[To: Fitz, 23:56] _Fitz…I’m so sorry_.

 

[To: Jemma, 03:49] _I know_. _I am too_.

 

 

 

**12:35pm, 21 st July 2013**

It is Hope who spots him first.

One minute, she is by Jemma’s side in the church porch, fidgeting as the wedding photographer sets up his camera, and the next she is gone, vanished among the congregation dressed in pastel colours and outsized hats.

Jemma tries not to be too concerned by the disappearance: after all, her nine year-old daughter is growing up ferociously independent and besides, what harm could possibly come to her in a church? But it isn’t long before her maternal instinct starts to itch anyway, and when the photographer finally waves away the wedding party, Jemma steps out of the porch and into the light of the church yard to look for her.

When Lance and Bobbi had first told her of their plans to get married in a quiet country church just outside of Doncaster, Jemma had thought they were joking. It turned out that, in fact, they were anything but. Neither of them was particularly religious and their usual style tended to be both spontaneous and understated, but somehow with a couple of strings of copper fairy lights and tasteful arrangements of lilac flowers in jam jars, Bobbi had managed to make the idea of a traditional church wedding their own. Now, Jemma couldn’t imagine the two of them being married anywhere else.

The church her brother and newly established sister-in-law chose for their nuptials is small and quaint, with a round tower and a circular graveyard with a pretty, flower filled garden and Jemma has to lift up her skirt to step over a clump of earth before scanning the church garden, filled with wedding guests, for Hope. As maid of honour and bridesmaid respectably they are both dressed in identical dresses: sky blue, elegantly cut, Regency-styles ones with embroidered red flowers at the hems, and it is this dress that draws Jemma’s eye before anything else.

Down by the side of the church, Hope is standing next to a man with sandy hair dressed in a light grey suit, who is crouching down to reach her height so he can talk easily to her. As it is, Hope appears to be doing most of the talking, waving her arms about enthusiastically and chattering away nineteen to the dozen. When the man next to her turns his head, Jemma feels her heart leap at how familiar his face is.

Fitz is watching her daughter speak with the same kind of reverence he had looked at her with the first time he’d met her as a baby, nodding earnestly whenever she is looking to him for approval and with a smile that reaches all the way to his eyes when she isn’t.

On shaking legs, Jemma takes a step towards them, then another and another, until she is almost upon them and finally Fitz looks away from Hope to see her. Immediately, he straightens up, his eyes widening as he takes her in.

‘Hi,’ he breathes, like the sight of her takes his breath away.

‘Hi,’ Jemma says, feeling strangely shy.

She takes a final step forward so the three of them are standing in a triad, her eyes unwilling to waver from him.

There is little difference between the Fitz she had left in New York three years ago and the Fitz standing in front of her now. His hair is a little shorter, yes, and he has trimmed his scruff back in a way that she finds herself wishing he hadn’t, but aside from this the only change Jemma can see in him are the little lines in his skin around his eyes and mouth. They create contour lines on his face, joining up one feature to another like the pictures of constellations in one of Hope’s books on space.

Jemma watches the way Fitz’s gaze moves carefully across her face and wonders whether he is mapping out her differences too.

After a few seconds, he swallows with a half-smile and turns back to Hope.

‘I can’t believe you’ve gotten so _big_ ,’ he tells her, and there is a certain sadness to the words.

Hope huffs and crosses her arms over the bodice of her dress. ‘I’m not really that big. I’m the sixth shortest in my class.’

‘Sixth shortest, eh?’

‘Mmm. But if Agatha had taken her shoes off when we were measuring our heights then I’d be joint seventh instead.’

‘Really?’ He cocks his head at her thoughtfully. ‘Then I reckon you ought to count yourself as joint seventh anyway.’

Hope purses her lips together and nods in agreement. ‘Yes, that’s what I thought too.’

If it were possible, Fitz’s smile grows even wider at this and Jemma feels like her heart is going to give way.

Suddenly, there comes a sharp whistle from up by the church. Jemma swivels her head around and sees Bobbi standing on the path with two fingers in her mouth. She holds up a small white wicker basket filled with red petals and raises an eyebrow at the group.

‘I have to go,’ Hope says apologetically to Fitz. Jemma turns around just in time to see her pat him on the arm. ‘Auntie Bobbi needs me. The bridesmaid has to scatter the petals on the ground when the bride and groom leave the church, so that’s my responsibility. Sorry.’

‘It’s okay.’ Fitz ducks down to give her a quick hug. ‘You go do your duty.’

Hope seems to like this phrasing and squares her shoulders proudly as she steps away from him. She has barely gone five steps before she turns back, her face creased into a frown.

‘You…you won’t go without saying goodbye, will you?’

‘No.’ Fitz shakes his head assuredly. ‘No, of course I won’t.’

Hope’s face eases, and she flies up the path towards Bobbi, who hands her the basket of petals and leads her away, giving Jemma a sly wink as she does so.

When she looks back at Fitz, he is smiling at her knowingly.

‘She’s just like you.’

Out of habit, Jemma rolls her eyes and snorts. ‘What, short?’

Fitz shakes his head, his eyes following the path Hope had taken with a wistfulness that makes her chest ache for something entirely unknown. ‘Everything.’

 The heaviness in his voices catches Jemma off guard and she falters before speaking again, wringing her hands in front of her.

‘How…how are you here?’

She doesn’t mean for it to come out so breathily, but it does anyway.

‘I’ve never taken a sick day since I started work at the publishers,’ Fitz explains with a shrug. ‘When they asked me to use them, I figured if I took them all at once I would have the time to come back here. To be home for a while.’

Jemma could point out that, much to her despair, his mother had moved back to Glasgow a few years ago, and that their house next door to her parents’ has been sold, but she doesn’t. Maybe there is more than one meaning for the word _home_.

‘How is it there?’ she asks.

‘Good. They let me travel a lot, even more than before.’ He sticks his hands in his pockets. ‘I gave them a few of my short stories a few months ago. They, ah, want me to start writing them a novel.’

Jemma’s eyes widen. ‘Really? Oh, Fitz, that’s wonderful! It’s what you always wanted.’

‘Yeah!’ Fitz’s eyes shift uncomfortably, and he kicks at the grass. ‘Or, at least, it’s one of the things I always wanted.’

She could have kicked herself for being so tactless.

‘I am sorry, Fitz,’ Jemma whispers. A part of her wants to reach out and take his hand. ‘About the baby. Truly I am.’

‘It’s okay,’ he murmurs back. ‘I don’t think I was ready to be a dad anyway.’

They both know that this is a lie, but Jemma would lie about the end of the world if it kept Fitz happy, so she says nothing.

Instead, she steps forward to hug him. In her heels, her chin comes up high enough to rest over his shoulder and she tucks her arms under his to pull him close. Fitz hugs her back, his head held against hers.

‘I’m sorry too,’ he says into her hair. ‘For what I said to you in New York and…and for letting you go without a fight.’

Jemma squeezes her eyes tightly shut to stop her tears and presses her nose into his jacket sleeve. It smells like washing powder, and rainy days, and Fitz.

‘It’s okay,’ she says, holding him tighter. ‘It’s okay.’

They stay like that for a little longer, him rubbing her back and her holding her nose into his shoulder, before Jemma steps away with a smile and a sense that something between them has been slotted back into place.

‘So,’ she says brightly, ‘how did you know we were here?’

‘Um…’ Fitz fumbles in his pocket, and produces a cream envelope with gold writing over and holds it up. ‘Lance and Bobbi sent me an invitation. I figured I ought at least to be at one family wedding.’

He tries to say it lightly, but his voice wobbles and his eyes flit down to her left hand, and the gold and silver rings she’s wearing there.

‘I am sorry I wasn’t there for you, Jemma,’ he says quietly. ‘I really am.’

Afraid she is about to start crying again, Jemma shakes her head quickly. ‘Fitz, I told you,’ she says. ‘It’s okay. I realise that you were still mad at me then, and you must have had a lot on your mind…’

‘I was never mad at you,’ Fitz breaks in, his eyes fierce. ‘Never.’

Jemma lets out a breath. ‘No?’

Fitz shakes his head vehemently. ‘No. Not ever.’ He sighs, and replaces the invitation in his pocket before continuing hesitantly: ‘there was…another reason I didn’t go to your wedding.’

His voice when he says this is dangerously low and quiet, and it makes Jemma’s heart skip a beat, but when he doesn’t volunteer the reason she knows better than to press him for it. Instead, she chooses to focus on her heartbeat now it has returned to its regular rhythm, and how it is beating so loudly she can hear it thrum through every inch of her body.

After a second, Fitz clears his throat. ‘So, where’s the lucky man?’

Jemma blinks. ‘Who, Lance?’ She turns and gestures vaguely behind her to the front of the church where the bridal party is getting ready to leave. ‘He’s up there, I think. Bobbi has a motorbike and I think they wanted to ride down to the reception together…’

She trails off when she catches Fitz watching her with the ghost of a smile on his face.

‘I meant _your_ lucky man,’ he amends. ‘Your husband. The man who is lucky because he got to marry you.’

‘Oh!’ Jemma feels a slight shock run down her spine and she swallows. ‘He’s, um, not here.’

‘No?’ Fitz almost looks disappointed.

Jemma shakes her head. ‘No. He’s very….busy, just now.’

(She doesn’t mention that when she and Hope had tiptoed out of the door that morning, her husband had still been snoring away on the living room sofa in the clothes he’d been wearing the previous day. He’d been so drunk when he’d staggered home the night before that he couldn’t even remember their names.)

Fitz raises an eyebrow. ‘Too busy to come to his brother-in-law’s wedding?’

‘His work is keeping him very occupied recently,’ Jemma defends.

(She doesn’t mention the booking forms for boutique hotels that she finds in the home printer, or the receipts for expensive perfume and jewellery she has never seen stuffed into his shirt pockets, that leak out into the washing machine when she does laundry.

This is a new, private humiliation that she is too afraid to share with anyone just yet.)

Fitz regards her carefully, gentle concern flickering behind his eyes and Jemma feels the need to keep talking, to justify herself.

‘He’s Hope’s father, Fitz,’ she says, her eyes trained on the ground. ‘He’s her father, and he wanted to get to know her and buy her nice things and marry me. He’s her father,’ she repeats. ‘I owed it to her to at least try and give her a normal family life.’

When she looks up, Fitz is frowning and looking like he is about to argue with her, so she moves on quickly before he can try and convince her that she doesn’t _owe_ anyone _anything_. If he did, Jemma isn’t sure that she’d be able to keep herself together.

 ‘It was a lovely service, wasn’t it?’ she remarks, falling back on the safest of conversations.

‘It was beautiful,’ Fitz agrees, dropping their previous topic with ease, much to Jemma’s relief. ‘And they looked really happy together.’

‘At last,’ Jemma sighs. ‘It certainly took them both long enough to get themselves together.’

Fitz grins. ‘“It is such a happiness when good people get together – and they always do”,’ he quotes.

Jemma returns the smile. ‘ _Pride and Prejudice_?’ she guesses.

_‘Emma_ , actually.’

‘Oh.’ Jemma tries not to look a little disappointed. ‘It’s _Pride and Prejudice_ that’s my favourite, you know.’

Fitz rolls his eyes, in an imitation of the gesture she tends to make towards him; it is so perfect that it is like looking in a mirror. ‘I _know_ , Jemma.’

He is smiling a soft, affectionate and achingly familiar smile that Jemma had decided long ago had only ever been meant for her. Seeing it light up his face again makes her heart warm inside her chest.

‘I miss you,’ Jemma says, before she has time to register exactly what she is saying.

Startled, Fitz’s face wavers before he manages to smile at her again, bemused and curious, but his eyes are more reassuring than they had been before. He shrugs, lightly. ‘I’m here.’

His inability to read into her blatant subtext is so like him that it makes Jemma’s throat close up with emotion as she nods, smiling back.

‘Yeah, you are,’ she whispers.

The sound of a motorbike speeding past the hedgerows behind them makes them both jump, and turn towards the source of the noise. Through the thick green wall of shrubbery, Jemma can just make out some flashes of polished black and silver metal, and as the bike zooms further away she sees the golden flecks of Bobbi’s hair glinting at her in the sunlight.

When she looks back, she finds that Fitz is already focused on her again.

‘Where’s the reception being held?’ he asks.

Jemma points behind the hedges and down the lane, and Fitz follows her finger. ‘There’s a large field, about a mile down that way. The farmer who owns it is a friend of the family and he’s allowed us to set up a marque there for the evening,’ she explains.

Fitz nods, and she watches as he takes a moment to ready himself before bridging the two steps between them, so he is standing right next to her and offers out his arm. Just this small movement causes him to step directly into the sun and the light spreads out behind him, momentarily dazzling Jemma.

‘Would you allow me to escort you there?’ he asks her, only half-joking.

Her heart should not be beating this fast at having him this close to her. It shouldn’t, and yet it is, and Jemma is far too blissfully happy to do anything more about it.

‘Yes,’ she says softly, ‘yes, please.’

She loops her arm through his and tucks her hand into his elbow to lean into his side, into the space there that she has always fit into perfectly.

‘I’d love nothing more.’

 

**11:18pm, 7 th September 2014**

The pillow underneath her head is so sodden with tears that Jemma has to force her face upwards for long enough to turn it over, before crashing back down onto the mattress and feeling the emptiness of the bed shudder through her.

It had been easy enough to hold back the tears when Daisy had accidentally stumbled upon her husband’s booking into the bridal suite at a hotel just east of Doncaster, the same hotel where they had had their prom, and Jemma had discovered that it wasn’t her he was meeting there. Then, she had been too filled with shock to think about crying.

It had also been pretty easy not to burst into tears during their drive to the hotel, and when she had burst into the lobby to find her husband nuzzling the neck of a girl half his age. The heat of fury had been too great, so great that it had still been burning as Daisy had driven her home, making it even easier to keep her tears at bay.

But it hadn’t been quite so easy once Daisy had left, and Jemma was left alone in the dark with the other side of her bed stone cold.

But now she is all cried out and all her sordid emotions have draining out of her to seep into the pillow, leaving only an empty ache in her stomach where she feels nothing at all.

Jemma lifts a hand to wipe her eyes, knowing that they will be red and puffy in the morning. Her gaze falls on her phone resting on the bedside table and the hollowness inside her turns almost painful when she realises how much she wants to call Fitz, even to have just a little part of him here with her now. It starts to gnaw away at her insides, the way she wants him with an uncontainable want that she hasn’t felt since she was a child crying out for her mum after a bad dream in the middle of the night. She wants him here to hold her, to talk things over with her, to make it better.

She _wants_ him, full stop.

Jemma has to hold back the urge to stuff the corner of the sheet in her mouth to stop herself from giving an empty sob.

She sucks in a tearful breath as her bedroom door creaks open, casting a thin splinter of light across the floor. Hope creeps into the room and crawls up the bed between Jemma’s arms to be close to her.

Jemma wraps her arms around her and brushes her lips against Hope’s temple, breathing in the warm, clean scent of her hair.

‘I’m so sorry, my darling,’ she murmurs thickly. Hope merely snuffles in response, burrowing closer to her mother.

‘What happens now?’ she whispers after a moment and Jemma’s heart breaks to hear how crestfallen she sounds.

She pulls her daughter closer to her, the urge to protect her now just as fierce as it had ever been.

‘Now,’ she promises, ‘I take care of us. Like I always will.’

Hope sighs into her chest, already half-asleep again. Jemma brings her fingers up to thread them through her hair, gently soothing her back into sleep with every stroke. She listens, until Hope’s breathing becomes regular again and then lies awake, staring into the dark while trying to think of a way to keep her promise.

It is only in the small hours of the morning, when Hope’s flailing sleeping limbs have pushed her out of bed and she is sitting at the kitchen table staring at the property section of yesterday’s newspaper, that the seeds of an idea start to grow in Jemma’s mind.

 

 


	3. the ending

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ‘Are we really crashing the wedding?’ Hope asks.
> 
> ‘Yes,’ Lance, Bobbi and Daisy tell her, at the exact moment Jemma says ‘no’.
> 
> ‘We are not crashing the wedding,’ Jemma says calmly, shimmying on the floor to bring her sheer tights up to her crotch. ‘You can’t crash a wedding that you were invited to.’

**9:27am, 16 th March 2015**

 

The spare bedroom at the back of their flat has become Jemma’s study, full of maps and bank statements and surveyor’s studies. Pinned to the wall is the floorplan of an old country house near St. Fillans, in Perthshire, the soon to be site of her very own hotel.

 

(Daisy had thrown her a very pointed look when she’d told her where the house was.

‘Perthshire. In Scotland.’

‘Yes, Daisy, in Scotland.’

‘In _Scotland_.’

Jemma had been decent enough to try and hide her blush.)

 

Since the autumn, Jemma has spent most of her free time inside the study, sifting through the necessary paperwork one must do if one wants to establish a hotel. It doesn’t take long for all her latent enthusiasms for management to rise to the surface, remnants of her teenage dreams and long lost plans for the future, and Jemma discovers an inordinate amount of pleasure at being able to put her years of service at the Earl of Doncaster to good use.

Slowly and steadily, the plans for the hotel in Perthshire come together and a week from now they are moving up there together: her, Hope, and Daisy too, who has been an integral part of the scheme ever since Jemma had tentatively proposed it back in October.

Daisy had leapt at the chance to become co-manager and coordinator of the hotel, and Jemma knew she would feel infinitely more confident about the move with her friend by her side.

Jemma stands in the doorway, with her hands on her hips and two large bin liners by her feet, and sighs. She has been putting off packing up the study because of the sheer volume of important documents stacked away here and the danger of misplacing even one of them during the move, but now the rest of her and Hope’s belongings are safely packed and ready to go, she can procrastinate it no longer.

Pulling her hair, recently cut and layered so it falls in delicate feathering on her shoulders, into a small bun on top of her head, Jemma moves to the desk by the window, intending to start by clearing out the drawers there. Anything useful can be packed up later, anything else can be dumped.

Jemma opens the top drawer and lifts it to the ground, dropping onto her knees beside it to start sifting through its contents. She finds an old pink dummy of Hope’s, at least a dozen paperclips, an antique letter opener she had long since given up as lost, an ancient Mars bar…and, stuffed right at the back of the drawer, so hard it is almost splintering into the wood, a file of papers marked with the name of her ex-husband.

A growl rises from Jemma’s throat as she feels her old resentment flare again, and she grasps the file firmly, fully intending to dump the lot straight into the bin bag. She stops short, however, when she notices the white envelope with blue and red edging sticking out of the file with an air mail stamp on the front. The letter is addressed to her and Jemma’s fingers trace over her name, written in Fitz’s unmistakable handwriting.

Her breath catches as she reads the day the letter was posted – the 24th of July 2013, the day Fitz had gone back to New York after Lance and Bobbi’s wedding – and she realises with a start why she has never seen it before. Her husband must have seen the letter come through the post one morning and hidden it from her in a fit of jealousy that, while Jemma has to admit was also well-founded, was ludicrously hypocritical. If she wasn’t so preoccupied by her eagerness to read Fitz’s words to her, she might have allowed herself to feel furious again.

Sitting back on her heels, Jemma fumbles about the floor for the letter opener she has just recovered; when her fingers close around it, she very carefully tears along the top of the envelope to reveal the letter hidden inside, a letter that has gone unread for two years longer than it was meant to. Jemma sees Fitz’s handwriting, spiralling out down the page like an outpouring of his thoughts onto paper, put there for her eyes only.

She finds herself thinking about the box full of letters she had written to him while she was pregnant, still tucked away underneath her bed ten years later.

Taking a deep breath, Jemma lifts the letter out of the envelope with shaking hands and leans back against the desk to read.

 

 

_“Dear Jemma,_

_I’ve always been very good at not saying things to you. And I’ve always been even better at not saying things to you that I desperately want to say to you. Both of these things are pretty ironic, seeing as I spent most of my days thinking about words and about you. Somehow, I’m just never been able to put the two things together._

_But in this letter, I’m going to break a lifelong habit and do just that. I’m going to take the chance, just this once, to tell you exactly how I feel._

_Jemma, you deserve somebody who loves you more with every passing day you spend together. You deserve somebody who when their heart beats it’s to the rhythm of your name, someone who wants to spend every waking moment with you, laughing with you, loving you. You deserve somebody who will look after you while you look after everyone else._

_I think that I could be that person._

_I_ know _that I could be that person, because I am already more in love with you than I think I could ever tell you._

_And I never thought I’d have the courage to tell you that._

_I know that you feel like you owe it to Hope to stay with her father, and I don’t want to push in somewhere I’m not welcome. But he’s not the man you deserve, Jemma. You deserve so much more than that._

_If there’s even the slightest chance that you feel the same way, call me. If you don’t call, then I’ll never mention this again, I swear._

_I lost you once. I can’t lose you again._

_I love you,_

_Fitz.”_

 

 

 

**9:42am, 16 th March 2015**

 

_Yes_.

Jemma feels her every atom ache with the word as she rushes out of the spare bedroom and across the flat to the kitchen.

As she falls down next to her laptop at the kitchen table to pull up her Skype and click on Fitz’s profile, her head is spinning and her heart is thumping so loudly against her chest as it chants that one word over and over again that it is all she can hear and she thinks she might burst with the sheer joy of it.

_Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes_.

 

 

 

**7:23am, 19 th March 2015**

_No no no no no no no no_.

 

‘His prom date.’

‘Mmhmm.’

‘His _prom_ date.’

‘Yes.’

‘His _prom date_ , as in the girl he took to your high school prom when you were both just wide-eyed innocent teenagers?’

Remembering how she had been anything but innocent on the night of her prom, Jemma sighs and wriggles uncomfortably in her airplane seat. ‘Daisy, must we really go over this again?’

Crammed into the window seat of a transatlantic flight from Sheffield Doncaster Airport to JFK, the last thing Jemma wants to do is revisit the reason she, Hope and Daisy have to fly out to New York in the first place.

Daisy holds up her hands. ‘I’m just trying to get things straight here. In case you hadn’t noticed, this whole thing is kind of confusing.’

‘I’d noticed, thank you.’ Jemma leans her head back against her headrest resignedly. ‘Go on then.’

Twisting herself in her seat so she is facing Jemma head on, Daisy’s forehead furrows in concentration.

‘Your best friend, who you’ve has probably been in love with since before you even knew what it meant to _be_ in love, but only managed to figure it out a few years ago, is getting married. Your best friend who confessed in a long lost love letter to you that he is in love with you too, is getting married. In five and a half hours. To his prom date. Ten years on from their prom. When you still haven’t told him exactly how you feel about him.’

She cocks her head to one side.

‘Does that sound about right to you?’

‘Yes, pretty much,’ Jemma has to admit.

When her Skype call to Fitz’s account had been answered three days ago, the last person she had expected to see on his video feed was his old prom date who she hadn’t seen in ten years, sitting at his kitchen table like she owned the place. It had taken Jemma a few stunned minutes, and a couple of not so subtle hints from the girl on the other end of the line, to fully understand the situation but it wasn’t until Fitz appeared on her screen, with two of his shirt buttons undone and a red flush to his cheeks, that it seemed to sink in and Jemma had thought that her heart was going to fall out of her chest.

Apparently the two of them had run into one another on Broadway a few months back. The old flame had been rekindled in what had been a whirlwind romance and, as was declared by the large diamond ring being flashed at Jemma through the webcam, was set to become a whirlwind marriage. They were getting married in three days’ time, Fitz had admitted without looking her in the eye, and he had been about to call her today anyway. Because he was in need of a best man.

Or, in this case, a best _woman_.

Daisy wrinkles up her nose and falls back into her seat. ‘God,’ she groans, ‘I hate childhood sweethearts.’

When Jemma shoots her an incredulous look across the aisle, she rolls her eyes and adds defensively: ‘You and Fitz don’t count, okay? The two of you are hardly childhood sweethearts, anyway. You’re more like…childhood _tragedies_.’

Jemma considers protesting, but decides against it when she takes a moment to consider what her friend has said and realises there’s little point in arguing. Looking back over the past few days, or _years_ really, she is even tempted to admit that Daisy might be right.

After everything they’ve gone though, it is starting to look like she and Fitz’s story will be a tragedy after all.

‘Thank you for coming with me,’ she says, throwing Daisy a grateful look over the top of Hope’s head. She is sitting between them on the plane, her tongue sticking out of her mouth as she carefully colours in a wedding card for Fitz and his fiancée. Jemma is immature enough to feel slightly smug when she notices that her daughter’s drawing style has Fitz’s bride-to-be looking rather rounder than she had on the webcam. ‘I don’t think I could do this without you.’

Daisy returns the look with a reassuring grin. ‘It’s not a problem. It’s not every day that you get a free invitation to fly to New York just to wear a pretty dress and smile at strangers. And besides, you had the ticket anyway, seeing as you didn’t tell Fitz that you had broken up with…’

‘I will tell him,’ Jemma interrupts hastily, her fingers twisting at a phantom ring on her left ring finger. ‘I’ve learnt my lesson with that one, I promise. I just don’t want to tell him before the wedding.’

Daisy’s eyes bulge. ‘Because you think he might call it off if he knew?’

‘What?’ Jemma gapes at her, Fitz’s confessional burning a hole in her holdall and his words a hole in her head. Her heart starts to beat faster. ‘No! Because I don’t want him to be thinking about it and feeling sorry for me on what is meant to be the happiest day of his life! He deserves…’ Jemma sighs. ‘He deserves better than that.’

Biting at her lip, Daisy thinks for a moment before meeting her friend’s eyes. ‘Would…would you _want_ him to call it off?’

Jemma falls silent, tearing her gaze away from Daisy to her lap. ‘I want him to be happy,’ she says finally.

In between them, Hope puts the cap back on her pen and leans back in her seat, propping her arms up on the armrests.

‘I can understand,’ she begins seriously, ‘why Uncle Fitz is getting married…’

Daisy snorts. ‘At least one of us does then, kiddo.’

‘…And why he wants Mum to be there. And I can also understand that Auntie Daisy is coming because Uncle Fitz sent Mum three tickets instead of just two…’

‘Even if your mum is regretting her choice to bring her more and more by the second,’ Jemma mutters under her breath as Daisy grins at her angelically.

‘But what I don’t understand,’ Hope finishes, oblivious to both their interjections, ‘is why Uncle Lance and Auntie Bobbi are coming too, when _they_ didn’t get invitations.’

Up until this point, Jemma has completely forgotten that her brother and sister-in-law are on the flight with them, both having rushed to book their tickets right after she had rung Lance to tell him what had happened. Neither of them had a formal invitation, but as Lance had pointed out, Fitz had come to their wedding. He and Bobbi are simply returning the favour. Jemma isn’t sure whether Fitz’s fiancée will appreciate the gesture.

From the row behind them, Bobbi pops her head through the split between Jemma and Hope’s seats. It is rather alarming, to just see her head with its halo of blonde hair pop through the leather seats as if it were floating in mid-air.

‘Uncle Lance and I are coming,’ Bobbi’s head says to Hope, ‘because we have been watching your mom and Uncle Fitz write their story for nine years now, and, honey,’ here, she pauses to wink, ‘we wouldn’t have missed them write this chapter for the _world_.’

‘Oh, that reminds me, Jemma,’ Daisy says mildly, from behind the inflight magazine. ‘How are you getting on with writing your best woman speech?’

Jemma stares down at the notebook in her lap, a clean page open in front of her. After four hours on the plane, the only words she has written on it are ‘potential best woman speech: version one’.

The rest of the page is woefully blank.

With a groan, Jemma drops her head down to rest against the little fold out table on the back of the seat in front of her.

 

 

 

**12:03pm, 19 th March 2015**

Their plane ends up having to circle the airspace above the airport for an hour due to security reasons, and by the time the wheels finally touch down on American soil, Jemma is about ready to burst into tears. The wedding was due to start at midday, and by this rate they were about to miss the whole thing.

The five of them race across the airport to baggage claim to collect their luggage, only to discover that Lance’s suitcase had been put on a flight to Tanzania instead of their plane to New York and consequently he will have to attend the wedding in his tracksuit and trainers. As Bobbi remarks, when they hurry into the arrivals lounge dragging their cases after him, it might actually be an improvement on his ill-fitting suit and Bart Simpson tie.

Outside, they find a tall, good-looking man standing next to a mini-van who introduces himself as Antoine Triplett, one of Fitz’s friends from his publishers and their ride to the wedding. As he helps her into the front seat of the van, Daisy announces that he is the most beautiful man she has ever seen and he proposes to her on the spot.

 

(‘No,’ Jemma wails watching them, as Lance hoists her up by her waist into the middle seat of the minivan, ‘it just can’t be that _easy_!’)

 

Lance, Bobbi and Hope all squeeze into the backseat, while Jemma wrestles with her best woman’s dress in the middle. As far as Jemma can see, Fitz’s fiancée only had two rules when it came to designing the dresses of the rest of the wedding party: first, they had to make their wearer look appallingly frumpy, and second, they had to be pink. Garishly so.

Trip sets the minivan off down the road towards Manhattan at the highest speed the group deems acceptable for a ten-year-old passenger. To accompany the frighteningly fast drive, Lance brings out his iPod and sets it to its loudest volume to blast out an ancient Busted track he’d downloaded especially for the occasion. Hope listens to the lyrics, her head cocked quizzically to one side.

‘Are we really crashing the wedding?’ she asks.

‘Yes,’ Lance, Bobbi and Daisy tell her, at the exact moment Jemma says ‘no’.

‘We are not crashing the wedding,’ Jemma says calmly, shimmying on the floor to bring her sheer tights up to her crotch. ‘You can’t crash a wedding that you were invited to.’

‘So, what _are_ we doing, then?’ Daisy wants to know, turning around from the front seat to squint at her. ‘Are we _stopping_ the wedding?’

‘Please God, stop the wedding,’ Trip mutters from behind the steering wheel.

From the short time they’ve already spent together rattling around in a minivan shooting through Brooklyn at an alarming speed, Jemma has managed to gather that Trip likes Fitz’s fiancée almost as much as she does, which is to say not a lot at all. The pink satin shirt he is being forced to wear as usher to the wedding service (along with its matching pink socks) appears to only be a small reason for his dislike as well.

Biting her lip, Jemma tugs her sateen skirt down to maintain what little she has left of her dignity and reaches for one of the shoes she’s been given to wear which are, of course, half a size too big. Trip rounds a corner a little too sharply and the shoe tumbles away out of her reach.

‘I don’t know what we’re doing,’ she admits through gritted teeth, crawling across the floor of the minivan to retrieve her shoe. Sitting back on her heels, Jemma shakes her head as she fastens the buckle, her words faltering and her eyes stinging with tears. ‘I just…I don’t know.’

On Lance’s iPod, the track changes to ‘Year 3000’ and for the first time during the trip, he doesn’t change it back.

Trip’s minivan zooms around the corner and comes to a screeching halt outside a pretty, red brick church with a small bell tower sitting on top of a small slope. There are flowers decorating the steps up to the path to the church and more flowers sitting on podiums dressed with ribbons by the church doors. The fact that all the flowers are in various shades of pink lets Jemma know that they are in exactly the right place.

Trip jumps out of the front seat first before running around to the other side of the van to open their doors. As Jemma tumbles out of the middle row, still desperately trying to fix her fuchsia corsage into her hair, she can hear the bells of the church start to chime.

‘This would,’ Daisy wheezes behind her, as the ragtag group takes the stairs up to the church two at a time, ‘be a very good time for you to tell us what you want us to do, Jemma.’

 ‘All I want,’ Jemma pants, tripping over a step in her too-big shoes, ‘is to get to my best friend’s wedding in time.’

‘In time to do _what_?’

She doesn’t have the time to answer her, because at that exact moment the church doors open and Jemma freezes on the top step. Hope, who had been running right behind her, bumps into her back and would have fallen back down the stairs if Bobbi hadn’t caught her.

Wedding guests dressed in pastel coloured dresses and linen suits flood out of the church and onto the path in front of it, chattering while their scarves flutter in the breeze. In the middle of this cluster Fitz emerges, being led by his bride out to the front of the church under a thin veil of pink confetti. Jemma feels her breath catch in her throat as she sees him; his features are pulled into a slightly forced grin and his wife’s fingers seem to be gripping onto his arm just a little bit too tightly.

Their two matching gold bands on their ring fingers twinkle at her in the sunlight like a particularly nasty taunt.

‘I hate to say it,’ Daisy says glumly, giving Fitz’s mother, who is blowing them both kisses from the church doors, a cheerful wave, ‘but I think you’re officially _out_ of time.’

Jemma is about to reply when Fitz finally turns to see her. His face lights up, his grimace easing into a natural smile and his eyes take on their characteristic shine. Almost shyly, he raises his hand out towards her and waves.

Bravely, Jemma pins a smile to her face and waves back, feeling her throat close up and her heart fall heavy inside her chest. Inside her, it feels like everything is starting to crumble.

She wonders if this feeling is anything like the reason Fitz had had for not attending _her_ wedding all those years ago.

 

 

 

**8:39pm, 19 th March 2015**

“If I could have your attention please? Um, excuse me, everyone? If you could just give me your attention for a minute that would be wonderful…

First of all, for those of you that I haven’t managed to meet yet, hello. My name is Jemma Simmons and I am Fi- sorry, Leo… _Leopold_ ’s best friend. Have been for a very long time, actually.

In fact, I can even tell you the day I first realised he was my best friend. We were six years old and we were playing in the bushes behind both our houses. We stayed there all afternoon until it started to go dark, and I remember thinking for the first time in my life that I didn’t want to see the stars. That I didn’t want it to be night time, because that meant I’d have to say goodbye and go home.

I’ve never been very good at saying goodbye to you, Fitz.

But even though I can tell you that, I’ve found that I can’t tell you exactly when Fitz and I met because I don’t remember that day. I cannot remember a beginning to our friendship, and I cannot imagine an end. I hope that an end never has to come.

When I…when I think about Fitz, and about our friendship, I like to think about the first law of thermodynamics: that no energy is created and none is destroyed. Energy is a constant, and I like to think that Fitz and I are like that.

Over the years, we’ve been pulled apart many times. Some of those times, admittedly in hindsight, could have been avoided, while others could not…but somehow, we always managed to find our way back to each other. Sometimes it took a little longer than we wanted it to for one reason or another, but it always happened in the end. I hope…I hope that’s the way it will always be. I hope we’ll always be able to find one another.

I hope that because if there’s one thing that I’ve found I always want in my life, no matter where you go or who you’re with…if there’s one constant I know I can always depend on…it’s you, Fitz, and the inexhaustible love that you have the strength to hold in your heart…

 

…A heart that today is welcoming in your beautiful new wife. You have each other’s hearts now, to have and to hold, to cherish and to love. For worse or for better, in sickness and in health. I wish…I wish you both all the luck in the world.

So, ahem, if you would, I’d like to ask you all to join me in raising your glasses to the luckiest couple in the room today…

To the bride and to the groom.”

 

 

 

**9:53pm, 19 th May 2015**

 

Nobody notices that he is missing at first.

Lance and Bobbi don’t notice, as they sway in the middle of the dance floor together, Bobbi’s fifties-style red dress a comical contrast to Lance’s jogging bottoms and grey t-shirt. In her heels, she is tall enough to have to bend down to rest her head on his shoulder, so it looks more like she is draped over him rather than dancing with him. Neither of them seems to be aware that they are slow dancing while the DJ is playing a series of dance remixes, and that the rest of the wedding goers are jumping wildly across the dance floor around them. And if they are aware of the fact, they certainly don’t care.

Hope doesn’t notice either, from her seat at one of the many round tables with pink tablecloths and matching pink napkins. She is sitting with Fitz’s mother and his publisher, who is furrowing her perfectly plucked eyebrows as she tries to make sense of Hope’s ramblings. Still a fan of using exaggerated gestures to emphasis her point, one particularly enthusiastic swipe of Hope’s hand sends several glasses of half-finished champagne flying onto the women’s laps.

Daisy and Trip certainly don’t notice. From their position at the bar, they can see the whole of the reception in all its fuchsia glory, but neither of them seems to be able to see a thing. They are looking at the world through their own pairs of rose-tinted glasses and the only thing they can see through them is each other. When Trip leans forward to whisper something in her ear, Daisy impulsively bobs forwards to kiss him and seems reluctant to let his lips go again afterwards. Trip appears to have no complaints about this as his hands come up to tangle in her hair.

In fact, as Jemma slips out of the door of the reception and closes it softly behind her, she is pretty sure that the only person who has noticed the bridegroom’s absence from the wedding party is her.

She wanders down the hallway, the abundance of fairy lights hanging from the ceiling twinkling at her as she goes. The upmarket hotel Fitz’s fiancée - no, his _wife_ \- has chosen to have their reception in is brand new and painted luminously white. Everything is where it is supposed to be and the whole place reeks of disinfectant and expensive perfume. In other words, it is nothing like what Jemma has designed her hotel to be. She wonders if this is a coincidence.

She follows the strings of fairy lights up to the hotel rooftop. Settled in the outskirts of Manhattan, the high rise building has almost as good a view of New York as the Empire State Building. In fact, Jemma thinks that she likes it even better from this angle. The world around her doesn’t feel quite so out of reach anymore.

At the edge of the roof she spots Fitz, sitting alone on the building’s ventilator with his back to her. His shoulders are hunched in a way that makes him look much younger than he actually is.

Jemma approaches him carefully, not wanting to startle him.

‘Hey.’

Fitz looks up and gives her a half-smile, rubbing his eyes. ‘Hey. What are you doing up here?’

‘I came looking for you.’ Jemma sits down next to him, tucking her skirt underneath her as she does so. It’s a fairly warm night, but without the steady thrum of warm air being pumped out of the ventilation it would be too cold to sit out for long. ‘I thought I might find you up here.’

Fitz turns his palms up to the sky. ‘Here I am.’

‘What are you doing up here anyway?’ Jemma attempts to copy one of Lance’s trademark playful grins. ‘Don’t you think a certain someone will be missing you at the party?’

Wrinkling up his nose, Fitz shakes his head. ‘Nah. We’ve already had our first dance as man and wife and apparently it’s her family’s tradition that the bride has to dance with every single one of her cousins at the reception. And it turns out my wife has a lot of cousins, so no. I don’t think I’ll be missed by her for a while. Given how freely the alcohol was flowing when I left, I don’t think I’ll be missed by _anyone_.’

‘Except for me,’ Jemma says quietly, leaning over to nudge him in his shoulder.

Fitz looks up in bemusement and nods. ‘Yeah. Except for you, Jemma.’

He falls silent again and Jemma sits back against the ventilator, crossing her feet over each other. In front of them, the lights of the city are flashing; she sees amber, green and scarlet, like the colours of a traffic signal. They are changing so frequently that Jemma can’t tell whether she is meant to stay still or move forward.

‘I wouldn’t have sent the third ticket,’ Fitz blurts out suddenly. Jemma looks up at him in surprise, and he nods towards her hand held in her lap with its two missing rings. ‘If…if I’d known.’

Quickly, Jemma tucks her hands underneath her, to hide them. ‘Oh, don’t worry about that. Daisy was happy to come. In fact, I’m afraid if you hadn’t sent the ticket she’d have probably bought her own to come anyway…’

She trails off when she notices Fitz looking at her with exasperation. ‘That wasn’t what I meant, Jemma.’

‘I know,’ she sighs, letting her shoulders sag. ‘I know what you meant.’

Fitz swallows, and his hand comes up to hover near her, as if he is unsure whether his comfort will be well received or not. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be,’ Jemma says firmly, shaking her head to hold off the prickling of tears. ‘I’m not. He was…he was an arsehole in the end. He cheated,’ the word catches unpleasantly in her throat, ‘on me. Multiple times. From almost the instant we were married, as it turns out.’

She feels Fitz stiffen next to her, and as he straightens his back she watches his jaw clench and his eyes grow hard. ‘The _bloody_ …’

‘Don’t.’ Anxious to quell his agitation, Jemma reaches over to catch his hand, which he has balled into a fist by his side. Her fingers flutter over his and she feels him relax instantly under her touch. ‘Don’t, Fitz. He’s not worth it, believe me. He was just…’ She shakes her head dismissively. ‘He was a mistake. _My_ mistake.’

Fitz gives a disgusted snort. ‘Trust me, Jemma, _you_ weren’t the one who made the mistake.’

He relaxes his defensive pose even so, but shifts his body a little closer to her protectively. Jemma feels the hairs on her arms prickle at his change in proximity and, despite the warmth in the air, she shivers.

Fitz starts to shrug off his jacket, presumably to slide it around her shoulders, but he stops short when he catches sight of her handbag sitting on the ground beside them.

‘What’s that?’

‘Hmm?’

Jemma turns and feels her heart sink when she notices the red, blue and white edging on the envelope of his letter sticking out of her bag. She’d brought the letter with her without really meaning to. At numerous moments on the flight over, she’d snuck out of her seat and to the bathroom with it clutched between her fingers. There, she’d sat and read the words over and over again, as though they might rearrange and change their meaning when she wasn’t looking.

Fitz bends forward and plucks the letter out of her bag before she can swipe it away from him; he turns it over in his hand, the expression on his face unreadable. Jemma finds that she is holding her breath when he looks up at her.

‘You’ve read it, then?’ he says hoarsely.

Pursing her lips together, Jemma waits for a moment before she nods. ‘Yes. I read it. I’m just afraid I read it a little too late, is all.’

When Fitz frowns, she realises she is going to have to be more elaborate with her explanation. ‘It only came into my possession very recently, you see. I found it tucked away inside a file of my ex-husband’s things as I was packing up for the move.’

Fitz’s eyebrows shoot upwards. ‘He _hid_ it from you?’

When Jemma nods, he fixes his eyes on the ground with a sharp hiss and, just like he had all those years ago in her back garden, he mutters a word under his breath that might have been ‘ _bastard_ ’.

‘I thought,’ he says quietly after a moment, his gaze still trained on the floor, ‘that it was just going to be another thing. When you didn’t call me but you kept on emailing and texting, I thought that letter was just going to be another thing that we didn’t talk about so that we could pretend it had never happened.’

This time, it is Jemma’s turn to look confused. ‘What are you talking about? When have we ever done that before?’

Fitz looks up at her and blinks, passing the letter back. ‘The night of your eighteenth birthday. Remember? You asked me if we could pretend the entire night had never happened.’

As the memory of her disastrous eighteenth birthday comes back to her, Jemma cannot help but chuckle. ‘Fitz, I don’t think we can really compare you confessing to being in love with me to a night that we got so drunk I can’t remember anything that happened after eleven pm!’

She leans across to give him another playful nudge, expecting him to laugh a little with her. When he doesn’t, and his body doesn’t sway at her touch, Jemma stops to look more carefully at his face. Fitz is staring at her, his mouth hovering half open as he frowns.

Then, slowly, he shakes his head.

‘You…you really don’t remember, do you?’

‘Remember what, Fitz?’ Jemma asks, her voice shaking.

Sighing, Fitz runs his fingers through his hair and shuts his eyes, titling his face up towards the stars. ‘We kissed.’

Inside her chest, Jemma feels her heart skip a beat.

‘Wh-what?’ she breathes.

Fitz opens his eyes again and turns to look at her. Under the light of the moon, his skin appears almost translucent. Jemma finds herself almost tempted to reach out to touch him, to reassure herself that he is still there.

‘It was at that club on the high street,’ he tells her. ‘We were both really drunk, you’re right about that, and you were much more drunk than I was. I just never imagined you were _so_ drunk that you couldn’t…’ He sighs again. ‘You pulled me out onto the dance floor and we were twirling and the lights were flashing and somehow we just…fell together…’

His voice trails off and Jemma lets out a sharp breath, only vaguely aware that she is trembling.

‘So…it was an accident?’

Fitz shakes his head. ‘Well, the first one was, I suppose. The second, the third and the fourth ones…not so much.’

‘Oh,’ is all Jemma can think to say.

Her hand comes up to her lips to trace them absently, as if the shape of the kiss might have left a lasting impression there for her to touch ten years later. As her fingers map out the curve of her bottom lip, Jemma allows herself to imagine Fitz’s lips fitting against her own and she feels a hot thrill run down the base of her spine.

When she looks up to him again, she finds Fitz watching her with an expression akin to longing.

‘The next morning,’ he continues, wringing his hands out in his lap, ‘you asked me if we could forget all about it, that you were embarrassed. I thought that meant you were ashamed of what had happened. I thought that meant you were ashamed of _me_.’

‘No,’ Jemma gasps in alarm, whirling around to face him. Her eyes prick with tears at the idea. ‘No, _Fitz_. That’s not how it was at all. I could never be ashamed of you. Not ever.’

Fitz sniffs, rubbing the end of his nose with his jacket sleeve. ‘I know you couldn’t. That was just the way it felt, you understand.’

‘I understand, Jemma whispers. ‘But, Fitz…’

She reaches out for his hand and turns it over in her own, twisting her fingers through his and squeezing tight. Fitz looks towards her, and when he does Jemma can see the slither of hope reflecting in his eyes and she takes a deep breath.

‘How could I ever be ashamed,’ she says softly, ‘of something I have been wanting for my whole life?’

She can hear the quiver in her voice as she says it, but tries to put as much strength behind the words as she can. When she sees Fitz’s eyes start to shine and a smile appear on his face, Jemma knows that, at last, they understand each other.

‘So,’ Fitz remarks quietly after a moment, his fingers tracing patterns on the inside of her palm. ‘What do you think we should do about it?’

Jemma bites her lip. ‘What _can_ we do?’ she asks, motioning towards his suit. ‘You just got _married_ , Fitz.’

Fitz glances down at himself and she watches as his shoulders sag. ‘Oh. Yeah.’

He looks so deflated that it makes Jemma’s heart twinge painfully, and she shuffles a little closer along the ventilator to him to loop her arm carefully through his. In his lap, she gives their joined hands another squeeze.

‘You still have me though,’ she whispers. ‘Even if not…like that. You have me.’

She watches Fitz’s face break out into a smile in the moonlight, and he bops his head down to rest for a moment against hers before straightening up again.

‘And you,’ he whispers in reply, ‘have me.’

They lapse into quiet again, both of them staring out at the city scape surrounding them. Jemma watches the lights of the buildings in front of her flicker, just the same as they had been ten minutes ago. She marvels at how that could be; how could everything around her have stayed the same, when her world had become so changed in such a short amount of time?

She reasons that perhaps it’s because her world had already been changed long ago. Maybe it’s only now that she’s catching up with it.

‘Hey.’ Jemma elbows Fitz gently in his ribs until he looks down at her. ‘How’s your novel coming along? I saw Hope talking to your publisher before I came up here. I hope she doesn’t say anything to hurt your chances.’

Fitz seems pleasantly surprised that she’d think to ask.

‘It’s going well, thanks. And I don’t think there’s anything Hope could do at this stage to dissuade them from publishing the book,’ he admits, ‘don’t worry. I’ve almost finished it, and I’m holding out hope that the office will publish it at the start of the summer, ready for the holiday reading rush.’

‘Oh, really?’ Jemma turns to him in delight. ‘Fitz, that’s incredible! Congratulations! And I think they’d be fools _not_ to publish it.’

The tops of Fitz’s ears turn pink and he ducks his head as he grins. ‘Yeah, well, you haven’t read it.’

‘But I’d like to! What kind of book is it?’ Jemma waggles her eyebrows at him. ‘Sci-fi? Fantasy? A gritty, hard-hitting crime drama about a Scottish publisher living in New York City?’

Fitz bursts out laughing, a sound that makes Jemma’s heart flip in her chest, and he shakes his head. ‘God, no. It’s not any of those things.’ He pauses. ‘I think it’s going to be a love story.’

‘Oh?’ Jemma cocks her head curiously at his choice of phrase. ‘You _think_ that’s what it’s going to be?’

‘Yeah.’ Fitz scratches the back of his neck and shrugs sheepishly before explaining. ‘It didn’t start out as one, not really. But somewhere along the way, without me even noticing, it became a love story.’

His voice turns soft as he says this, his words thoughtful, and Jemma considers them for a moment.

‘How does it end?’ she asks.

‘I don’t know,’ Fitz says gently. ‘It’s not quite finished yet.’

Across the city, somewhere over the bay, a spot of light in the sky catches Jemma’s eye. She sucks in a breath and is about to point it out to Fitz, as excited about this shooting star as she had been about the ones they’d seen together as children, when she notices the slight trail the star is leaving in the sky and realises that it’s not a falling star after all. It’s just a passenger jet.

Jemma feels a tug of disappointment in her chest, for more than one reason. Up until this moment, she’d been able to lose herself in Fitz, to pretend that the two of them were the only two people in the world. The sight of the airplane only reminds her that other people still exist. The earth is still turning, the sun will come up in the morning and, just downstairs, the rest of their lives are waiting for them.

It’s bad of her to feel upset by this; to be upset that soon enough this night will come to an end and they will have to part ways once again. That soon enough, she will have to share him with the rest of the world again. It is bad, and wrong, and selfish of her to feel that way.

And love, Jemma thinks, shouldn’t ever be selfish.

Carefully, she loops her arm back through his and brings her head down to rest on his shoulder. Fitz responds to her touch, leaning closer to her so that his head drops down onto hers.

‘I hope,’ Jemma whispers, rubbing her thumb against the material of his sleeve, ‘that it ends the way you want it to.’

She feels Fitz smile rather than sees him; the corners of his mouth lift against her hair and tickle her as they do so. He lifts his head up ever so slightly so that his lips can press a light kiss to the top of her head before returning to where he had been resting with a sigh.

‘Thank you,’ he murmurs to her.

 In his lap their hands twist together again, and Jemma decides that it is okay that this night will end. No energy is created and none is destroyed, and the energy between her and Fitz is the most powerful energy she has ever known. Nothing could ever bring anything that powerful to an end.

She leans further into him and keeps her eyes wide open, wanting to take in every last second that this night has to offer to her before it is gone. Next to her, she can feel Fitz’s heart beat in perfect harmony with her own.

They stay like that, linked together by their arms and their hearts, until the lights in the distance die away and the sky becomes streaked with lilac and, just over the horizon, they can see the sun start to rise.

At last, it is time to say goodbye.

 

 

 

**3:12pm, 14 th September 2015**

 

Every storm cloud has a silver lining.

Fitz remembers this as one of Jemma’s favourite sayings, one that had always felt oddly antiquated for such a small person to utter. But then again, that was Jemma all over. She had always been an odd bird, that one.

He remembers it as a phrase she’d trotted out regularly to him as children, when he’d had a habit of being continually dismayed at everything that happened to him. Initially, he had been irritated by her endless optimism, then bemused, until, finally, it had enchanted him.

Everything about her enchanted him eventually.

But even Fitz had to admit that it was lucky Jemma’s nature was to always seek out her silver linings, especially given the hands fate had dealt her over the years. And she had been wonderfully successful at finding them too: her unexpected pregnancy had given her a beautiful and adored daughter, and a cheating husband had given her the confidence she’d needed to finally pursue her dreams.

Fitz has had his share of storm clouds over the years too.

He wonders whether Jemma knows that though all of them it’s always been her who’s been his silver lining.

 

 

The house the taxi drops him off at is Victorian, red brick and turreted with a green lawn spread at the front and a walled garden at the back. Behind him is Loch Earn, sparking in the early autumn sun, and the sounds of shouts from tourists exploring the waterside reach Fitz’s ears as he climbs the steps to the front door of the hotel.

Stopping in front of the door, he glances up at the house. Late blooming honeysuckle has been twisted around the front porch and against the AA plaque, which declares that the hotel has received a four-star rating.

 

(That makes him smile, imagining the moment when Jemma must have unveiled the plaque.

‘Only four stars?’ she’d have scoffed. ‘What’s wrong with the place? Why not _five_ stars?’

Everyone around her would have chuckled, and Lance would have leant over to kiss her forehead.

‘Reach for the stars, sweetheart,’ he’d have told her, only half-teasing.)

 

The windowpanes and drainpipes, which had been peeling white when he’d seen the first pictures of the place, have been given a fresh coat of paint in a pretty sage colour and Fitz can see bunches of wildflowers sitting on the windowsills through the glass.

A movement in the corner of his eyes makes him turn his head to see a trail of balloons strung up against the fence leading behind the house to the garden, where he can hear laughter and chatter and see bunting strung up on the walls. There is a party being held in the garden, in celebration of someone’s thirtieth birthday. If Fitz followed the balloons against the fence, crunching along the neat gravel path to the garden, he knows exactly who he will find there.

There will be Bobbi and Lance, sitting together on a bench with their hands joined over Bobbi’s swelling abdomen and whispering words to the tiny human growing there. There will be Daisy and Trip, daubing ice cream on each other’s noses and bursting into peals of laughter. Trip had moved to St. Fillans four months before to be close to Daisy. Last Fitz had spoken to him, he was running a second hand book shop in the village and was planning to offer a mobile library service to the hotel. He and Daisy were happy, and Fitz was pleased for them.

Hope will be at the party too, running rings around everyone else and sneaking cake off people’s plates.

And Jemma.

Jemma will be there too.

Taking a deep breath, Fitz shoulders his rucksack with determination and pushes open the front door to step inside.

The hall is cosier than he’d expected, with warm cream carpets and new pine furniture. The walls are all painted the same sage as the outside, except for the wall behind the front desk which is wallpapered with a delicate pink floral pattern. There are photographs framed on the walls of the loch and the surrounding countryside and in one corner, Fitz spots a giant world map. He wanders over to it and lets his fingers trace across the red thread stringing from the UK towards New York and back again.

The sound of a door banging somewhere at the back of the house makes him jump, and he swivels around just in time to see Daisy come into the hall through a door to his right. She stops short when she sees him standing next to the front desk and almost drops the tray of empty glasses she is holding.

Fitz shifts his weight from one foot to the other awkwardly. ‘Hi.’

He watches Daisy drink him in, her eyes flicking quickly from his hair, still tousled from the plane journey, to his half-empty rucksack, to the empty space behind him, and her eyebrows narrow suspiciously. ‘Hi, Fitz.’

‘I was wondering,’ he says, nervously, ‘if I could speak to the manager?’

Daisy considers this, chewing on her lower lip as she tries to make sense of the situation. Eventually, she nods, and Fitz thinks he sees a spark light up in her eyes. ‘I’ll see if I can find her for you.’

She leaves her tray of glasses on the desk and hurries back the way she’d come. Fitz waits until she’s out of sight before he shoulders off his rucksack and unzips it to retrieve the gift-wrapped present he’d left at the top. He’d even bought a bow for it at the airport, and now he retrieves it from his pocket to attach it carefully to the top of the gift.

He is just straightening up when he hears the sound of duel footsteps approaching the hall and when Jemma appears in the doorway, Fitz thinks he might stop breathing.

Since he’s last seen her, she’s let her hair grow again so that it is just below shoulder length and is falling in soft waves around her face. Her cheeks are flushed, and the afternoon sun shining in through the hall window bathes her face in a warm, rosy light. She’s wearing a knee-length, white broderie dress that almost seems to float around her as she takes a hesitant step forward towards him. Her shy smile and the way she seems almost speechless tells Fitz that she is just as struck to see him as he is to see her.

‘Hi, Fitz,’ she says softly, and it feels like a great weight that had been pressing on his chest has been lifted.

‘Hi,’ he whispers back, unwilling to take his eyes off of her. Behind her, he sees Daisy step past both of them and sneak across the hall to collect her tray again before disappearing into the rest of the hotel.

Clearing his throat, Fitz holds out the present he is still clutching towards her. ‘This is, uh, for you.’

Jemma steps towards him and gives him a wry smile as she takes the gift. ‘Fitz, did you come all the way from New York just to give me my birthday present?’

Fitz shrugs, sticking his hands in his pockets as he returns the grin. ‘Sure, why shouldn’t I?’

Shaking her head at him, Jemma starts to pick at the sellotape holding the wrapping paper together and Fitz has to hold back his urge to tell her just to rip it, the way he had at all their childhood birthday parties. Carefully, Jemma pulls the last of the paper off and gasps.

‘Oh, Fitz! Is this your book?’

‘Yeah,’ he admits sheepishly as she eagerly turns the book over to examine the cover. ‘It took a bit longer than I thought it might for me to finish it. The release date’s been pushed back to the end of the month, but I managed to get an advance copy. Author’s perks, I guess.’

Jemma looks up at him over the cover, chewing at her lip. ‘Did it end the way you wanted it to?’ she asks.

‘I hope it has,’ Fitz says, and takes a deep breath before adding: ‘take a look at the dedication.’

Jemma’s eyebrows quirk at him curiously and she opens the book to turn to the dedication page.

The words there had been the hardest of all the words he’d had to write; it had felt like he’d spent longer trying to find the best ones to put there than he had on the rest of the book. But, eventually, he thinks he’s found the right ones. He can only hope she agrees with him.

As Jemma’s finger runs over the page, Fitz mouthes the words written there silently to himself: _to who it’s always been about_.

‘I figured,’ he says carefully, when he sees her suck in a breath, ‘that the person that’s about should be the first one to read the book.’

Jemma looks up to meet his eye and when she smiles, Fitz sees a new understanding light up in her face. She takes another step towards him, her mouth hovering open as if she is about to say something but before she can, Fitz dives in first.

‘So I was, um, wondering if I could check into a room? Please?’

 ‘Oh!’ Jemma blinks in surprise, then seem to shake herself. ‘Yes, yes, of course you can.’

She hurries around him to the front desk and Fitz turns as she does so, so that he doesn’t have to tear his eyes away from her. Jemma taps urgently at the computer before looking past him uncertainly, as if she is seeing for the first time that he is alone.

‘Where’s…’

‘I came alone,’ Fitz puts in quickly.

‘Oh?’

‘Yeah.’ He nods. ‘I’ve, ah…I’ve been alone now for quite some time.’

Jemma’s eyes instantly widen, and her shoulders sink. ‘Oh, Fitz…’

‘It hadn’t been right,’ Fitz explains. ‘Not for a while now.’

 

(It hadn’t been right since the night of their wedding, and she hadn’t noticed he had been missing from the party until after breakfast.

In fact, if Fitz was honest with himself, it hadn’t been _right_ since long before then.)

 

‘We got a divorce in July.’

Jemma purses her lips and he can see the genuine sincerity in her face as she shakes her head at him. ‘Fitz, I’m so, so sorry.’

‘Don’t be,’ he says, echoing her own words from all those months ago. ‘I don’t think I am.’

Jemma catches his gaze across the desk and holds it for just a moment longer than necessary. Then, she turns away from him towards a long row of keys hung against the wall.

‘I’ve put you in Room Six,’ she tells him over her shoulder. ‘It has a really lovely view of the loch, a double bed and an ensuite room with a shower.’ She turns back towards him and clears her throat pointedly. ‘Daisy?’

Daisy’s head pops out from behind a corner, making Fitz start.

‘Yeah?’

‘Would you mind,’ Jemma asks primly, ‘showing our guest up to his room?’

Daisy meets Fitz’s eyes across the room before sucking in through her teeth and tilting her head apologetically to Jemma.

‘Sorry, sweetie,’ she says, stepping out into the room carrying her tray of refilled lemonade glasses. ‘But my hands are full.’

As she sweeps out of the hall, Fitz thinks he sees her wink. But whether it is directed at him or at Jemma, he can’t quite tell.

Taking a deep breath, Jemma picks up the key. ‘Well,’ she says brightly, stepping out from behind the desk to stand next to him. ‘Shall we go up?’

Fitz picks his rucksack back up off of the floor as Jemma shows him to the staircase and they start to climb together, her first and him following. As they walk, Fitz can’t help but watch Jemma as she moves: the way her hair bounces down her back and the way she is holding her hands loosely by her sides. He’s been watching her make these movements for almost all his life but today if he thought it were possible, he’d have sworn they’d grown even more beautiful to him.

Tearing his eyes away from her, he glances back down at the hall beneath them.

‘This place is amazing,’ he says, the awe in his voice genuine. ‘Seriously, Jemma. Everything is utterly amazing.’

She looks back at him, evidently pleased. ‘I’m glad you think so,’ she says. ‘It’s what I always wanted to do, after all, run my own hotel. Admittedly, it has taken me ten years longer than I originally planned to get here but…’

‘…That doesn’t make it any less impressive,’ Fitz finishes. Then, he grins. ‘I never knew you’d wanted the hotel to be in Perthshire, though. You’d never told me that. We’re in Scotland.’

Jemma turns to him to roll her eyes, but underneath she is smiling and her cheeks are flushed a little pink. ‘I know where we _are_ , Fitz.’

She waits at the top of the stairs for him to catch her up, then takes him down the corridor to the room with a bronze number ‘6’ hung on the door and slides the key into the lock.

‘Here we are,’ she says, standing back from the door to let him into the room. It’s bright and airy, with delicate green wallpaper and a large bed with fresh white sheets under the window which, as promised, looks out onto the loch. ‘There are towels in the bathroom, and a telephone if you need to call reception.’

Fitz drops his rucksack on the carpet next to the bed as Jemma continues rattling off her manager’s speech. ‘Breakfast is from seven o’clock onwards and dinner is served at half past six,’ she tells him, ‘although it will be a little later tonight due to the private party being held in the garden.’

‘Am I invited to the party?’ Fitz asks, only half teasing.

Jemma purses her lips in pretence of consideration. ‘I suppose you are,’ she says, before holding up his book in her hands. ‘But I think I’ll have to excuse myself for the rest of the afternoon so that I can read my best friend’s debut novel.’

Fitz grins and takes a step towards her to take the book out of her hand. ‘In that case, I reckon I might give the party a miss.’

‘Oh?’ Jemma arches her eyebrow at him and he shrugs.

‘I want to keep my best friend company while she reads.’

Jemma snorts gently and reaches out for the book, rubbing her thumbs against the pages. ‘Why did it take you so long to finish it?’ she asks. ‘When I saw you in March you said you were all but done with it.’

‘I was,’ Fitz confesses. ‘But I kept getting distracted.’

‘By what?’

_Not what_ , he wants to say, his heart starting to beat faster against his chest. _Who_.

_I kept getting distracted by you_.

‘I couldn’t stop thinking,’ he says suddenly, ‘about the speech you made at the wedding.’

Jemma looks up at him from the book, her eyes wide and her lips slightly parted. ‘My speech?’

Fitz nods, and turns to set his book down on the bed before taking a deep breath.

‘Every time I sat down to write,’ he explains, ‘I could hear your voice, hear your words. You were all I could hear and for a long time I couldn’t hear my story over you. But that was before I realised you _were_ the story. We _are_ the story. I…I finished it very quickly after I realised that.’

Jemma sucks in a little breath, and steps forward to take his hand in hers, a silent encouragement for him to keep going. Licking his lips, Fitz does.

‘The night of your eighteenth birthday, the night that we kissed…I remember thinking that it was going to be our beginning. And then the next morning, when you told me you wanted to forget all about it, I thought we were ended before we’d even properly begun. I thought that for the longest time. But I was wrong. You were right,’ he says shakily, ‘and I was wrong.’

This time it is him who reaches out, letting his hands find her waist to draw her in closer to him. Jemma responds in kind, looping her arms around his neck so that she is so close to him he can smell the scent of vanilla on her skin. It is intoxicating, in the way she has always been to him.

‘We didn’t begin that night,’ Fitz says deliberately, choosing his words carefully. ‘Like you said, I don’t think I could ever fix on a point of our beginning.’ He lets his forehead drop down, so it is leaning against hers. ‘We were in the middle before I even knew we’d begun.’

Jemma looks up at him, the movement tipping his head upwards so he is looking into her eyes, which are shining brightly. ‘Are you trying to seduce me with Jane Austen quotes?’ she asks.

Fitz grins broadly. ‘ _Pride and Prejudice_ ,’ he whispers. ‘It was always your favourite.’

Jemma gives a short, breathy laugh of delight, and steps even closer into his embrace.

‘I don’t care, either,’ Fitz continues, the warmth of Jemma’s skin against his making his confidence grow more by the second. ‘I don’t care about where we began, I care about where we _go_. And I don’t ever want us to have an ending.’

‘And neither do I,’ Jemma says, and the joy in her words seems to vibrate through him, filling him so full of it that Fitz thinks he might burst if he doesn’t kiss her.

And so, closing his eyes, he ducks his head forward to do just that.

His lips meet hers in the lightest of touches, so light in fact that at first Fitz feels more of the tickle of Jemma’s breath on his lips than he does her skin. But that is before he hears her gasp, and her hands move to press against his neck and she pushes herself forward onto her tiptoes to kiss him back.

Jemma’s lips are just as soft as he remembers, and she tastes like lemonade and spun sugar and sunshine as she kisses him. She gently works his mouth open to deepen their kiss, and Fitz feels a spark light in his chest as she does so, a spark that makes him pull her even closer.

The first time they had kissed, it had felt like they were standing in the wake of a supernova. This time though, it is an astronomical alignment. For the first time, Fitz feels that they are both finally where they are supposed to be.

He doesn’t want to pull away from her, but kissing Jemma has a habit of stealing his breath away, so eventually he has to. Breaking away, he lets his hands fall from her back to her waist as their foreheads knock together softly, keeping them as close as possible. With his heart thumping in his mouth, Fitz opens his eyes.

Jemma’s lips are still parted and she is breathing heavily. Her eyes are still closed, but fluttering, and there is the ghost of a smile on her face.

‘I’m almost glad I don’t remember when we kissed before,’ she whispers, before opening her eyes into his. ‘Because that would have been the most beautiful first kiss I’ve ever had.’

This makes Fitz laugh, a bubble of laughter that rises in his throat like a wave, which is a shame because it means he has to wait for a moment before he kisses her again.

But when he does, he bends down so he can lift her up in his arms so her feet are dangling off the floor and he spins her around and around. Jemma gives a delighted shriek, and her arms clasp tightly around his neck, like the delicate link of a daisy chain. As he carries her across the room to the bed, Fitz can feel her smile pressing like a rubber stamp into the skin of his neck.

He lets her down gently, so that she falls back against the white duvet with her arms still around him. As he leans over her Jemma’s hands come down to frame his face, holding him at arms-reach as she examines him intently. Fitz would think she was committing his every inch to memory, if he wasn’t so sure that she knew him inside out already.

‘I love you,’ Jemma says, and in the pale light reflected from the loch outside, Fitz thinks that in that moment she is shining silver.

He grins broadly, and bends down to kiss her again.

‘Then I love you too.’

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A special shout out to Georgia, Eva, historygirlbites/starrydreamer and notthatstupidcatagain for always being so lovely about this story! I have truly appreciated every word of encouragement and niceness.
> 
> Every story has a beginning, a middle and an ending. I hope you enjoy reading the ending to this story as much as I have enjoyed writing it.


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